I need to combine several choral pieces into one book - at present they are all separate files. They are mainly SATB, but some are in three parts and the the main melody in these needs to be labelled ‘Air’ rather than ‘Soprano’ as in the four part pieces. An added complication is that I also want the Sop, Alto and Tenor parts to be transposable for Bb instruments, but still in the four part format. The players double the singers, but like to see all parts and the words. Any help will be welcome.
Assuming there aren’t copious layout-specific overrides, it should be as simple as:
- Setting up one project the way you want it.
- Going File > Import > Flows, then bringing in the other Dorico projects.
- Telling Dorico to merge with existing players.
- In Setup mode, click the drop down to the right of the Soprano Player, then right-click the Soprano Instrument and go Edit Names. Replace Soprano with Air in the Full Name and Short Name fields.
The easiest way to get things to transpose for Bb instruments is to wait until you’ve finalised the score and vocal lines, then copy and paste the contents of each stave to a Bb instrument. From Setup mode you can exclude the Bb players from the full score layout.
This is where Dorico excels. Each piece will be a separate “Flow”, and you can change the number of “players” (staves) for each Flow. The Flow Headings will appear at the top of each piece: you may want to add other text fields and tokens to the Flow Headings (e.g. Composer, lyrics); or you could just turn off Flow Headings and use the first page Master Page for each new piece.
Thanks both for your help. I have successfully created the book but not without difficulty - Dorico kept going into (Not responding) mode, which meant I had to keep closing the programme. Is this a problem that anyone else has with Dorico? It’s not something that happens with other programmes on my computer. Is it something to do with the size of the file? It does happen with smaller files, but not as much. Very frustrating.
This only ever happens to me if I’ve got multiple Dorico projects open simultaneously. It’s not that Dorico crashes; it’s that when you switch projects Dorico has to reload all the sounds for that project (even if both files contain exactly the same players). You don’t need multiple files open to do what you’re trying to do…
Of course this is just a hunch, and I may be completely wrong about the cause of your problem. If so, I apologise profusely!
Thanks again Pianoleo. You may well be right, although I thought I only had the one file open. However, after seeing one of Daniel’s posts about disabling Sound I have set the Playback Template in Preferences: Play, to Silence, and that has much improved matters.