Colla voce / colla parte / "col." lines

[HaraldS]

I would like to replace unison situations with wavy or straight lines, but only in the score.

E.g. when a Big Band trumpet section plays unison, I would write out Trumpet 1 normally, but have lines for trumpets 2-4 marked “unison w/Trp.1” or “col Trp1”. The music for trumpets 2-4 should display normally in the parts, of course.

That’s not only for me as a conductor to see immediately what’s happening, but would also come in handy when teaching and analyzing scores with students. Such abbreviation lines have been used in jazz aranging (e.g. Mancini, “Sounds and Scores” teaches them), but up to my knowledge they have never been adopted by music notation software, though there would be good reasons to do that.

I know I can do slash regions, but they are mainly used for improvisation, which would be confusing.

How can this be achieved in Dorico?

Second wish: Ideally, I would like to only enter this colla parte line in trumpets 2-4 and never have to execute a copy function from trumpet 1, because if I change trumpet 1, I could forget to copy these changes. The colla parte line would act as a pointer to musical content belonging to another instrument.

[charles_piano]

In that case, you can enter trumpets 2–4 using cues from trumpet 1. They’ll be linked to trumpet 1, so any changes will automatically apply to trumpets 2–4.

As for the lines, you can enter them in the full score and make them transparent in the parts — they won’t be visible there.

(But this involves certain cue settings (note size, hiding rests, etc.) that might be a problem elsewhere in your project if you also want to use “real” cues.)

[Janus]

You could create a Playing Technique “col part” with a wavy line continuation, then add a cue from the Trp1 in the other parts…

[HaraldS]

Charles and Janus, thank you very much. Looks very promising, though I would indeed need normal cues in the project. I’ll lok into that.

[charles_piano]

@HaraldS

I would indeed need normal cues in the project.

You can always restore the usual appearance of cues locally by adding the rests and setting the note size to 75%:

Or the other way around, you can leave the default settings as they are and manually adjust the appearance of the cues wherever you want the unison lines (notes to 100%, remove rests)