Cues - multi-instrument chords

General question first, are multi-instrument cues common in the wild?

Dorico question: I’ve got a spot where there’s an oboe/clarinet/viola chord as about the only thing that could be a cue for the solo violin, and I feel it would be more supportive as a chord, rather than one voice of it. Is there a way to do that?

Yes, as long as you don’t input a 2nd cue at the same position, you can move it into place by e.g. inputting it in the following bar and pressing Alt/Opt-left arrow until it’s back in the first bar. What I’ve then done before is edit one of the cue labels to be e.g. “Fl/Cl” and override the text for the 2nd without adding anything, so it doesn’t show a 2nd label.

You probably could get all 3 cues in, but that might end up with messy stem directions/rests. Alternatively you could add a dummy staff that doesn’t appear in the score with a manually condensed chord and cue that.

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Thanks Lillie. I think the dummy staff is the way to go, but how do I go about it? Do I need to add a part, or could I do it with a custom layout?

You can add a player in Setup mode and then untick it from the full score layout. Then you can edit its part at the point you want to cue.

Some sort of “codensing, for cues” is certainly on my wishlist.