In a musical theatre score, I have a number of singers assigned to a single player, which allows me to take advantage of Dorico’s instrument change feature rather than handling these transitions manually.
That said, it would be very helpful to have a global option to control where instrument changes are announced. In my case, I would prefer for a character name (for example, “Alice” - see below) to appear at the point of their first entry, rather than at the start of the flow. Unlike an instrumentalist (such as a reed or brass player), a singer does not require advance notice in order to prepare.
Is this currently possible? I have explored Engraving Options and the Properties panel in Engrave mode but haven’t found a solution so far. If not, what would be the best way to maintain a clear and efficient workflow, particularly one that accommodates future changes to the score without relying on manual adjustments that might easily be overlooked?
I’ve tagged this as a feature request, as I suspect this particular use case (multiple singers assigned to a single player, rather than multiple instruments) may not have been considered in the design of the instrument change feature. That said, it is entirely possible I have overlooked an existing option.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, @Jesle. I’m now wondering whether there might be a small bug in 6.2, as I already had “Before first note in new instrument” set for Instrument transition position. However, as can be seen in the screenshot in my original post, the instrument (character) is still being announced at the start of the flow.
This behaviour is, of course, expected when “Show instrument change at start of flow” is enabled, as it is in my project for the selected flow. However, unticking this option does not cause Dorico to display the instrument change at the first entry, as I would expect.
Ummm…
Here’s a screenshot of my settings (Layout Options → Players → Instrument Changes):
I’m now looking more closely at my Vocals flow to check how Dorico is handling instrument changes.
In addition to what I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve noticed something a little odd. There are instances where I would expect an instrument change to be announced, but no label appears. For example, midway through a song, a new character joins for the first time (upper part, shown below), yet no label is displayed.
In situations like this, it would be helpful for both instruments (i.e. characters) to be announced. In this particular case, the distinction is somewhat clear from the clefs, one indicating a female voice and the other a male voice, but this approach breaks down when two or more voices of the same type are involved. In such cases, there would be no clear way to identify which character should sing which line.
That’s a helpful suggestion, thank you. However, I’m still trying to understand why Dorico doesn’t appear to be processing instrument changes in accordance with the Layout Options.
Specifically, it is neither announcing the instrument at the expected position (“Before first note in new instrument”) nor consistently handling situations where two or more instruments are to be played simultaneously (in my case, multiple singers).
One of Dorico’s strengths in this area is its ability to prevent situations where a user might forget to add a label, particularly in a large-scale score with 20+ flows and around 110 minutes of music, where user error becomes increasingly likely.
I’ll create a cut-down project to illustrate these issues more clearly.
I believe this flow illustrates the issues mentioned earlier in this thread.
If a player holds more than one instrument and the music requires them to be played simultaneously, no instrument change labels appear (see Flow 1), even though Dorico correctly presents the required number of staves. Flow 2 shows that this is not an issue when there is no overlap. It’s easy to imagine real-world cases where a musician might be required to play more than one instrument simultaneously (a percussionist, for example), so perhaps this scenario has not yet been fully accounted for. In my use case, the ability to label multiple singers correctly would be a significant time-saver.
The second issue concerns the placement of instrument change labels. In Flow 3, it appears that the “Show instrument at start of flow” setting takes precedence over Instrument transition position: Before first note in new instrument. However, if this option is unticked (Layout Options → Players → Instrument Changes), no labels are shown in any of the flows! I wonder whether this points to a bug.
