Create linked staff / measures

Transposition overrides in Layouts get me really far when I try to set up a part layout for multiple differently tuned instruments. However, there are some cases where I needed it to do a little more:

  • When writing a piece for a player holding a C clarinet and an A clarinet (The Barber of Seville is one such case), I want to create part layouts for players who might not have a C clarinet at their disposal.

    The best solution I got from this discussion was to create a separate hidden player and manually copy the music from the original player. While pragmatic, this introduces issues of course when I find typos or want to do changes in the music, in which case I have to remind myself to also apply those changes for all copied players.

    Specific to this issue, MuseScore offers linked staves to allow for flexibility in the usage of instruments, clefs, notation styles, etc. in different part layouts.

  • Extending this idea a little, when writing orchestral scores, often times there are phrases I want to keep “in sync” between multiple instruments. Dorico already links certain things like ties and dynamics. It would be nice to also have the ability to link entire bars as well (something akin to cue notes, just for… everything).

1 Like

Can you say more about the ways that transposition and clef overrides for part layouts are deficient?

Hi Daniel, thank you for responding.

I noticed that, when I declare all instruments be transposed to one key (i.e., A-clarinet and C-clarinet shall be transposed to Bb), the “instrument change” is still visible, even if it tells me to change from a clarinet in Bb to a clarinet in Bb.

TranspositionOverrides.dorico (1.6 MB)

Sometimes, it isn’t sufficient for me to transpose everything into one key. I was preparing the clarinet parts for a concert (see here if you’re interested) and noticed that some sections of music for C clarinet were easier to play on an A clarinet than a Bb clarinet.

I found one workaround, where I add two C-Clarinets and have one be transposed to Bb, the other to A. It seems to work, but then the original part tells the player to change from a clarinet in C to a clarinet in C.

TranspositionOverrides2.dorico (1.6 MB) (in this version, I notice the “to Cl. in C” label clashing with the multibar rest number)

This is specific to orchestral arrangements. From the musescore documentation, it seems that there’s also some use in changing the notation style to tabulature, for example, but it’s not something I am currently working with.

1 Like

I just saw that Dorico 6.2.10 introduced the ability to hide instrument change labels in Engrave mode. This about solves all my specific problems, thank you all :smiley:

Of course, it would be very convenient if Dorico also detected if the instrument names before and after the switch are exactly the same, which would make these specific change labels redundant to the player. Nonetheless, being able to hide the change labels at all is a very welcome change.