Hello all: I’ve written a four-flow arrangement for string quartet and choir. All voices and instruments are on their own staff (no multiple voices). I’d like to now create a 2-stave choral part and a 2-stave reduction of the strings for use in choir rehearsals. Is condensing the best way forward, or is it better to add blank staves to the bottom of the score and copy/paste using the “Reduce” menu item under Edit? Thanks in advance.
Hi @gary.ewer, I wouldn’t use condensing (especially not for voice staves) but rather create 2 new players - like a Choir (reduction) instrument and a Piano instrument for the string reduction-, and use a combination of Reduce and Paste into voice or other similar methods. Then you can create a layout that has only these added two players.
Under Note Input options/Paste Special, you have some useful options that you can change depending on the desired workflow:
If you could upload just one page Dorico file as an example, I am sure someone will give you further detailed suggestions.
You may find this post useful (there are many more useful posts if you search “choir reduction”):
This is excellent, Christian_R, I really appreciate this. I’ve been trying it, and it’s working out just fine. Thanks very much for taking the time to help.
@Christian_R’s response is exactly what I would do and often do. Reduce and paste into voice. The only thing that can get a little frustrating is where lyrics are placed for the different voices. For SATB voices, I tend to do S and T voices first and then change lyrics location to above staff and then Paste Into Voice for A and B. If the rhythms are identical in the voices sharing a staff, I select both voices simultaneously and Reduce into the appropriate staff.
It was helpful for me, at first, to create a duplicate of my original file with “TEST” somehwere in the name to differentiate. Then I would practice copying into voices, reducing voices and dealing with lyrics. It was very illuminating to simply try the various possibilities and using the Filter to select or deselect voices.
Thanks kasky1 - That advice about using a test file is sound advice, but I had already jumped in and everything seemed to be working (beginner’s luck!). Once I had reduce-copied the string parts onto the same staff, it did stems-up/stems-down for the reduction, so I then went to Edit->Notations->Voices->Change Voice->Up-Stem Voice 1, and it made it look more like a piano part, with shared stems.
Thanks again!