Cue player names

Dorico
1

Can I request the ability to label a cue with the player’s name rather than the instrument or staff label?

2

That strikes me as a bit odd: can you tell me why you would find this useful? Thank you.

3

In this particular case, I have a brass octet (an actual one, not just notation…), with four trumpets who play various instruments and parts.
It is much easier to label them ‘John’, ‘Lucy’, ‘Debbie’ and ‘Dave’. I use this for the players in Dorico and also for the part name displayed on the part.
I still want the score labelled ‘Trumpet 1’ etc.
But… the players are used to seeing ‘Lucy’ as a cue label. It is way more efficient than ‘Trumpet 3’ which results in a ‘who is that?’ question.
If I could unlabel the cues I could put the names in myself, but I don’t want both.

I also label this way for particular MT runs or tours. It is honestly very useful, but I don’t want to change the instrument name itself.

‘Odd’ is often useful…

4

Thanks for the explanation. That makes totally sense to me. This would require to tell Dorico wether you want it to name the cues accordingly to the instrument played or to the player that holds the instrument.

5

I haven’t used cues yet, but what about this idea?

  1. Create second brass octet, copy all parts from orginal octet.
  2. Change in second octet instrument names as an ‘John’, ‘Lucy’, ‘Debbie’ and ‚Dave’, etc.
  3. Create new layout without this second octet
  4. Input cues taken from second octet

Will it work?

6

Del_Gesu, actually that’s quite a cute workaround. As long as I keep everything up to date between two sets of players…

7

I believe there’s already quite a good solution for your problem. Select the cue, open the properties panel, and you can label the cue however you want by using the ‘Start text’ property.

8

Andgle, you’re right…! I had to interrupt my lunch to try that out straight away… Wow!