I’ve checked the manual but haven’t been able to find an answer to the following question: is it possible to change an instrument name on a per-flow basis? Unless I’ve overlooked something, this doesn’t appear to be addressed, though I may well have missed it.
The reason I ask is that in the musical theatre genre it’s common to have a “Vocals” staff that contains music for several characters. Within a flow, labels at the start of entries are then used to indicate which character sings each section of the song.
However, some songs are for a single character, and in those cases it would be clearer if the instrument were named after the character rather than simply “Vocals”.
At the same time, I want to ensure that if the instrument name is changed in this way, the music remains in the layout originally assigned (so that all vocal music, for example, continues to appear in the same vocal layout).
Is there a way to do this, or a recommended workflow for this situation?
What a superb idea, @Vadian. This would avoid the need to manually add labels to indicate changes of character within a song, while also ensuring everything ends up in the same layout. You’ve made my day I can’t wait to give this go…
I already use this approach with instrumentalists (for example, sax doubling clarinet and flute, or trumpet doubling flugelhorn), but it hadn’t occurred to me that the same method might work just as well for singers. In fact, it works beautifully.
I now have two players assigned to the soloists, one holding all the female solo voices and the other the male voices, along with two ensemble players representing two distinct choruses, and everything appears to be working seamlessly. I just need to work out the most sensible way to organise the layouts, and then everything should fall into place more or less automagically.
It’s hard to overstate how much time this will save, and I’m extremely grateful for your suggestion. For anyone working in musical theatre, this seems an extremely efficient way to organise vocal parts, leaving Dorico to handle the complexity of formatting them.
For example, one of my layouts contains five male solo voices, yet in a solo number Dorico correctly labels the character and displays only the relevant vocal line.
Apologies for the follow-up post, but it occurs to me that the excellent Proofreading feature, which normally highlights situations where a player appears to be playing more than one instrument at the same time, may not recognise that, in this particular use case, the behaviour is intentional.
Here, a singer player may hold multiple characters who may or may not sing simultaneously, so the apparent overlap is by design rather than an error.
It would be very helpful if there were some way to indicate to the Proofreader that this is intentional. A similar issue was mentioned in another thread recently, where a percussionist may quite legitimately play more than one instrument at once (for example, whistle and drum).
I’m copying in @Richard_Lanyon in the hope that this post is of interest.
I’d love to learn how to do this, @Janus, but searching the manual for “proofreader,” “proof reader,” and “proof-reader” doesn’t return anything useful.
I can’t wait to give this go…
