Cues in Drum-Part - not possible?

One problem/bug though.
The one bar repeats doesn’t cause any note spacing, this must be fixed! Or is it a setting I’ve missed?

When moving things in Engraving Mode it’d be really helpful to be able to move objects in only one direction. (e.g. shift-drag as in many other apps)

The thing I like most about this method (the two instruments one) is that once it’s set up, you can simply copy and paste where you want it and then change the note values. Should you decided to scale down the instrument change label to 1 instead of of using the properties panel, it will speed up the process to the point where it’s actually quite painless. I really wish I could have thought of that instrument change method myself!

Thanks Marc and MatsHall:

I will certainly give your ideas a try. I was beginning to think that I would have to revert to Sibelius to get an acceptable percussion part, negating all the hours I have invested in trying to get Dorico to behave as we should expect.

I’ll let you know.

David,
That type of drum set notation isn’t implemented yet and this is really a workaround but with an acceptable graphical result.(but not yet acceptable concidering the time it takes to get there… :yum:)

I love the way cues works, but since I’m using booth “melodic” and “rhythmic” cues quite often I’d like to see these as two different tasks with separate settings so I don’t have to do manual settings in properties every time.

Great way to think about cues. I hope this notion finds its way into Dorico sometime soon.

Mats, you will find that bar repeats get crushed together like that if you have used ‘Ends voice’ on one of the notes or rests earlier in the music. Find the culprit and switch that property off, and the spacing will be fine.

Daniel,
Yes, there was an ‘Ends voice’ involved in this.
But I wonder, is this an expected behavior? Now I had to hide rests by changing the color to white instead.
Combining slash regions, slash voice and normal notation results in some rests that needs to be taken care of and I guess ‘Ends voice’ was the wrong way…

Right now I’m creating my drum parts in a treble clef C-instrument part, so I can use Cues. For the future I really hope you’ll concider separating melodic- and rhythmic Cues as two different operations with separate settings for layout and appearance.(e.g. Shift-U / alt-shift-U)
In my Jazz-scores I’m using both quite often, and for every rhythmic Cue I need to set the appearance in Properties. (maybe 50-60 times in one drum part…)

I’m absolutely certain you have something super smart coming up, but I just wanted to point this out. :+1::grinning:

Finally solved the problem of the unwanted staff change for all rests before a cue in the single line percussion part. It’s not elegant but it works:

  1. Create the cues with an invisible 5-line instrument as discussed above. Sections preceding each cue in the single line percussion part will be in a 5-line staff. This is undesirable.

  2. Create another player of the identical single line instrument. Do not include it in the score layout.

  3. Use it to create graphics to paste over the improperly staved sections.

See attached for examples

1 Like

I’m new to Dorico and to this forum, so I’m not sure if this has come up or could be helpful. The workaround I came up with for adding instrument cues to drum drum and percussion parts was to create a cue in a different instrumental part, cut it and then paste it into the drum part. I then selected rhythmic cue from the properties window and the cue appeared above the drum slashes. So, If I wanted a trumpet rhythm cue above my drum slash notation, I would create a temporary cue in the bass part, cut it (Cmd+X) and then paste it into the drums. It seems to work for getting instrumental cues into drum/percussion parts. Any changes to the source material also automatically updates in the cue as you’d expect. Seems like it’s a good solution for the OPs first problem.

Hi James,
Welcome to the forum, and thanks for sharing. Brilliant workaround!

Yes! Welcome and thank you!

**Leigh

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the method used here to create a melodic cue in a drum part. My particular challenge is to have the drummer see an alto saxophone melody. Is there a step-by-step set of instructions for this somewhere?

Create Alto Sax cue and put it in an empty stave. Then copy/cut the pasted cue and paste in the drum staff.

Does anyone know why there has to be a workaround at all? Sorry to compare this with Sibelius - as a Sibelius user tempted by the price reduction for Dorico, it’s somewhat inevitable - but I definitely prefer it that in Sibelius I can do cues in the same way for all instruments, without needing a workaround; and also that I can select a group of instruments that are to have the same cue, and paste-as-cue into all of them in one go, which doesn’t seem to be possible in Dorico. Dorico cues are very neat (and certainly very good if you want a cue in the same bar as ‘main’ notes) but in such instances, they definitely take longer to do.

It’s the downside to percussion kits working the way they do. In Sibelius, percussion kits aren’t really any different to any other staves: they’re just a stave. In Dorico, each percussion instrument has its own internal stave, but what the user sees can be
a) individual staves for each percussion instruments
b) a grid (with multiple percussion instruments on it)
c) a five-line stave (with multiple percussion instruments on it)
This presentation of percussion instruments can be different per layout - you can give the percussionist(s) single line, but save paper in the conductor’s score with everything condensed onto a five-line stave.
This is infinitely more flexible than Sibelius’s handling of percussion, but there are flipsides.

Try this. It doesn’t work.

You can’t show a melody on an unpitched staff. When you copy and paste a cue of a pitched instrument onto an unpitched instrument, the cue becomes unpitched. If you need to show a pitched cue on an unpitched staff, you’ll need to assign a pitched instrument to the player holding the percussion kit, then add the cue to that instrument, which should (provided instrument changes are allowed) cause the cue to appear by way of an instrument change at the appropriate point. In Engrave mode you can then hide the redundant label or labels that warn you about the switch to and from the pitched instrument.

2 Likes

Are you planning on making this function somewhat less convoluted, in a future release? This is the kind of time-consuming workaround that drives me back to Sibelius.

Yes.