When working on a SA-TB two-stave choir reduction, I believe it is quite common to have lyrics shared by the entire congregation to be placed in between the staves (with no lyrics below the TB stave). Is there a setting that will centre the lyrics between the two staves or should it be done manually?
For dynamics, I believe the SA stave will have dynamics above and TB below, correct?
Finally, when the time will come to ‘explode’ this into SATB for the choir part, is there a way to already have the shared lyrics copied over? Not the end of the world to have to do it manually, but …
AFAIK shared lyrics would have to be managed manually. For my use cases, I tend to prefer using the condensing function, but there are times when condensing has to be done manually.
That means writing for SATB (4 staves), then activating condensing with custom condensing groups SA-TB? This would show two staves with staff labels but without the brace or bracket, right?
While I have never attempted this before, I have passively read several reports here on the forum about this approach bringing issues.
Could you please elaborate and/or show an example of how this works?
In my case, the source is the reduced grand-stave for the choir so it is easier for me to just copy what I see and then perhaps explode it onto more staves at a later stage. Not sure if this is the best approach or what Dorico expects here.
I think currently, doing a manual reduction is the de facto recommendation, but it could be useful to try the condensing function to see if it could work for you in your use case. For homophonic textures, it could work well.
In the example here, I originally condensed the choral manually (layout SA/TB) by copying and pasting each part into a up/down stem voice.
I’ve added another layout Condensed reduction which results is pretty much the same thing, but it required me to delete all the lyrics save for the alto voice, to ensure only one copy of the lyrics displays in the reduction. However, this borks the original source, and the SATB layout. Ideally, in the future, there could be a way to fine tune the way lyrics are displayed similar to the Change condensing function, but that doesn’t exist.
You can also see in the last phrase, I re-added the soprano lyrics because its rhythm is slightly different. If you wish to have dynamics displayed as you described, I added them to the soprano and bass voices.
Also, to your last point about copying shared lyrics, I think this would have to be done manually.