I am writing a chamber piece with a percussionist playing a setup with vibraphone, crotales, and triangle (maybe additional unpitched perc too). The triangle part is often interwoven in the same measures as pitched percussion.
The ideal notation solution here (from discussing with percussionists) would to simply keep a 5 line staff for everything and use a different notehead for the triangle hits.
It took some digging but I figured out how to do this by going into the triangle “Instrument Definitions”, setting it to a 5 line staff (so it wouldn’t switch to a 1-line staff for half a measure), and telling it to use the treble clef instead of the percussion clef (so it wouldn’t place an unnecessary percussion clef).
However, one messy element remains: Because Dorico treats the triangle as unpitched, even on the treble clef, it forces the key signature to be re-labeled after each triangle hit. This is super messy, and I cannot find any way to remove these unnecessary key signatures.
I tried other ways of setting up this percussion player, but the method I described is the closest I was able to get to what I wanted.
Am I missing something? Is there a better way to set up this percussion setup? How can I remove these key signatures?
I can’t recall right now but it might be possible to hide those key signatures via the Properties panel? If not, maybe scale them down to 1% (effectively hidden)?
There’s no ‘hidden’ property on these key signatures, and the scaling oddly isn’t working… it scales the associated instrument change label instead, not sure what’s going on there.
But even if that worked, that’s a hacky workaround. This is a pretty common sort of percussion setup for contemporary chamber works, and especially for something like musical theater, so I felt like there must be a more proper way to do this? Or maybe Dorico simply doesn’t have good support for mixing pitched and unpitched percussion in setups like this yet. If it was all unpitched, the kit editors work great.
If you don’t care about playback, you could just put the triangle in the crotales part with an x notehead, and add the instrument change text as staff text or a playing technique.
Possibly.. if you could put the triangle on the next MIDI channel on that same VSTi slot and used an expression map with a relative (or absolute) channel change to change to that channel for the “Triangle” technique. You would just have to handle the transposition then to shift the B natural to the correct pitch where you would hear something.
