As you can see from this original, bass drum and cymbals were intended by the composer to be played by 1 person. And of course, writing parts by hand in the 1950s, 5-line manuscript paper was used.
2 questions: How would you ideally set this up in Dorico? And that leads to my second question: these instruments don’t play very often in this movement, and it’s essential for me to add cues. Since these are non-pitched instruments, how would you approach creating cues?
Yes, so is that basically what’s necessary in Dorico as a rule? If you have unpitched percussion, you can’t use single line staves, or else you won’t be able to indicate meaningful cues?
So I’m also realizing that, even if you change the staff to 5-line, and even if you change the clef to bass clef, because these are non-pitched instruments, Dorico only gives you the possibility of monolithic single-line cues! What have other people done in these scenarios – and why did Dorico make it this way? (Am I missing something?)
One can always use the Basic or Extended Drum instrument in Dorico, but then adding the pitched cues would not be possible–at least not without considerable extra effort.
That is why @jesele suggests using a non-playing instrumental staff masquerading as a drum part. If playback is necessary, then one would likely use a drum instrument without the cues (in the score) and supplement that with a separate part for the player, based on a pitched instrument staff and hidden in the score.
Ah I see! I just found this similar solution through Google. What a weird workaround! I take it Dorico just didn’t (yet?) really deal with this issue. Maybe they could streamline it in a future update?
I think you can select the first one, do cmd+shift+A (select more) a few times, then in Engrave mode, set the custom text to a space. The only problem is finding them again, if you need to change them.
Gosh! Thank you so much! I assume everything we’re talking about on this page is a workaround, and not really the way Dorico intended/created for this to be done.
I’ve been having some success adding another staff/instrument on which to put cues. I selected “treble staff” in the setup menu. However, sometimes, even when I try to enter a cue onto my own cue staff, Dorico switches it back to a monolithic cue on the percussion staff. The piccolo cue here, I attempted to add to my bottom “treble staff”, so the pitch contours could be shown, but Dorico insisted it join the top staff and be pitchless. Any thoughts?
I found something interesting – perhaps a glitch? Even with a separate “cue staff” added so I could add cues to unpiteched percussion music, Dorico would often still transfer the cue I was trying to write in the cue staff automatically back into the percussion staff, meaning that I couldn’t add pitched cues. But for some unknown reason, if I first do it that way anyway, and with the unpitched cue showing up in the percussion staff, I go back to the cue staff and try to add another cue, it works! No idea why.
