Create a two-staff instrument?

Dorico
1

I am transcribing an English horn concertino from orchestral accompaniment to wind accompaniment, and there is a repeated 8-bar passage that is identical in the 1st and 2nd times through the repeat except in the solo part, which is ornamented the second time through.

I could of course just make it 16 bars written out, repeating the accompaniment identically in the second 8 bars, but my publisher likes me to save paper wherever possible. Therefore, what I would like to do is make the English horn part a two-staff part and turn on Hide Empty Staves in the second staff. That way, the only part of the second staff that would show would be in the 8-bar repeat.

So two questions:

  1. Is there any better way to do it than making the solo part a two-staff part and hiding the empty staves on the second staff, and;

  2. Assuming that’s the best way to do it, how do I make the English horn part a two-staff part? I have searched the forum and the manual, and I can’t find it.

Thanks as always

2

Lee, you could probably create a Piano instrument, rename it to English horn, transpose it by a fifth and then switch on the ‘Allow individual staves of multi-staff instruments to be hidden’ option on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options.

3

If you use Sibelius or Finale, you can create (for now) a two-staffed English Horn there, export as XML and import it into Dorico.

4

I tried that. Seems multi-staff instruments have to be ‘C’ instruments. I also tried hand editing a Dorico XML export.

5

I think I cracked it.
English Horn 2 staves.zip (408 KB)

6

OK, I found the trick to doing this without hand editing the XML. This works for the ‘S v6’ program.

Create a two staff English Horn.
Put score in Transposed view. << Important!
Then export the XML with Dolet.

This adds a specific transpose tag to the XML file.

7

There you go! Good to know you got it working!

Hopefully this will be relaxed sometime soon.

8

Could you do an “8-bar Ossia” with the ornamented version, and have that sit/float on top the first-time section?

9

You could indeed do that, but then you’d have to faff around with it in the part layout too, doubling your work, and as an ossia is currently only possible by creating a separate music frame the note spacing may need fixing manually (again, separately in each layout).

If you’ve got an easy way of fudging a two-stave English Horn stave (which the OP does) then it really is much easier. Hopefully the next Dorico update will address this.

10

KB, your suggestion worked fine.

Thanks!

11

But this should no longer be a problem now, right? With proper ossias and additional staves implemented it should be a breeze to do this in Dorico 2.

12

Yes, this whole thread is rendered moot by the new functionality that arrived in Dorico 2 yesterday.