Cross-staff beaming between multiple percussion staves (same player)?

[Petri_Hanninen]

Hi all,

I’m working in Dorico Pro 6 and trying to notate a multi-percussion setup for a single player. The setup includes:

• 1 snare drum
• 4 bongos
• 4 octobans
• 6 tom-toms

I want the snare drum to appear on its own 1-line staff, and each of the three other instrument groups on their own 5-line staves. They are currently set up as four separate instruments under one player.

Here’s the problem: I’d like to use cross-staff beaming between these staves — just like with two pitched instruments — but Dorico won’t let me move notes between them using “m”/“n”.

Is there any way to enable cross-staff beaming between these percussion staves without giving up proper percussion instrument definitions?

Or do I need to fake it using pitched instruments if I want that kind of engraving flexibility?

Thanks in advance for any insight or workarounds!

[dspreadbury]

Welcome to the forum, Petri. I’m afraid this can’t be done with unpitched percussion. If you can use a single grid presentation for the kit, that’s probably the best you can do. You can have non-default gaps between the different items in the grid, so you can group the instruments in that way, but it’s not possible to have multiple five-line staff presentation types held by the same player and cross notes between them.

[jesele]

Something like this (without any octobans/boobams)

Jesper

Or with groups: