Composing for percussion is still needlessly difficult

Dorico
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Specifically multi-percussion parts. Why are they still treated like a completely different instrument type? I’ve been using Dorico since version 1, and am getting extremely frustrated that I STILL cannot:

  • Copy parts from single percussion lines to multi percussion lines (and vice versa)
  • Input percussion stickings properly. Using the lyric editor and pressing enter takes me to the next note on that line, not the very next note, skipping a bunch of notes each time. What is the deal with this?
  • Edit velocities. Am I missing something here? Why can’t I simply edit a velocity in the key editor like any other instrument.

The above makes what should be a 10-minute task take up to an hour. I genuinely don’t understand the programming philosophy surrounding multi-percussion kits in general. Whatever it is, it’s not working.

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This is just one of Dorico’s philosophies, and is what makes customising kits/moving instruments between players/staff labels/instrument changes//VST routing (and more)… so flexible.

Would you mind describing a specific scenario?

I have no idea what this means, I’m sorry. How do stickings and lyrics have anything to do with each other?

I just checked and this appears to work for me. Do you have a basic project that you can upload for us to check?

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I write marching percussion music. A common practice is to first write the snare drum part and then copy it to the tenors part to have a starting point and then simply tweak and move the drums around. You cannot do this in Dorico. There are a ton of other reasons why copying single line percussion parts to multi-percussion parts would be needed.

Percussion stickings do not exist in Dorico still. The only way is to use the lyric editor to type in “R, L, etc”. For multi-percussion kits, this is frustrating because you can’t simply hit enter to move to the next note.

I’ll post a project when I get home but at the moment I cannot seem to edit velocities for my tenors part which is a huge issue.

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I’m not at all familiar with marching percussion but it is very easy to display all the instruments in your percussion kit separately (single-line instruments). Is this something you have tried already?

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