Working on a piece for percussion ensemble where each player can take multiple instruments (but only one at a time). I am required to give a full score layout which shows both the payers and the individual instruments they are playing. Here is a sample score:
The problem I’m having is that if you assign multiple instruments to a player, Dorico does not allow this sort of layout. You can either display the player names or the instrument names - BUT NOT BOTH.
If you select to display the Player Name, Dorico will display the instrument they are playing but only at the beginning of the flow or when the instrument changes. So by the time you’re several pages into the score there’s no easy way of telling what instrument is being played.
As a kludge you can use Groups. This sort of works:
However there’s a lot of white space here when only 1 player is playing. You can hide staves like this:
but the labels on the individual players are hard to make out. That “1” (short name for Player 1) is very hard to make out at first glance. I tried changing the short name to something a bit longer - “P-1” - but that does not display at all. Apparently there’s only room for one character ion the short name for Player 1. And I cannot find anyway to change the font on those Group Names and or control the bracket shape or size.
Thoughts / suggestions.
That’s odd, @eheilner, I just tried this and can see “G-1” as my abbreviated group name:
I see the issue - it’s because Fl has a full staff with more vertical space. Where I’m having this issue is with a Clave - which is just a single line staff. It’s like Dorico is only allowing as much room as the staff allows. I’m not seeing any option to display the full Group Name after the first page.
Makes good sense. I wonder if there’s a collision setting in Layout Options that would help…?
I couldn’t find anything helpful. AFAICT there’s virtually no control over Group display.
But beyond that, the need to use Groups to display both the player and the instrument being played is a total kludge which goes against the whole design philosophy of Dorico.
Am I the only person out here who has ever scored for multiple players using multiple instruments and wanted to show both the players and the instruments being played?
Well, looking at the Varèse example at the top of the thread, I’d actually say that the original engraving more or less exactly does use the equivalent of player group labels. Obviously the appearance is a bit different (the digit is orientated horizontally rather than vertically, and a curly brace is used rather than a straight bracket), but it seems functionally identical.
Does the Varèse continue to show those groupings on every page after the first of the score? I have seen that score, but can’t remember. My guess would be that it does not, and instead relies on the staves being joined by brackets, which would perhaps be a better approach?
Use the Small ensemble bracketing approach in Layout Options, and then you should find that all the instruments in each group are bracketed together.
Hi Daniel,
As always thanks for the prompt response. You can check out the Varese score here, it looks to my eyes that he keeps the same formatting throughout.
I tried using the Small ensemble bracketing - it seems to work provided that there is not already a grand staff instrument for that Player Group - but as the Marimba is grand staff for Players 2 & 3, it is counter productive - you have the additional brackets only for Players 1 & 4:
There’s another issue with the parts - the instrument changes appear differently. Instead of the usual “To Instrument” labeling, we see both instruments. Here’s an example for Player 1:
Now to be clear, these issues are not show stoppers. The score is workable/usable. But to achieve this I had to break Dorico semantics. Instead of assigning multiple instruments to the players, I had to treat players as instruments, and I had to treat a Player Group as an individual player. Now maybe this is an edge case not worth spending limited resources on - as a retired software engineer I appreciate that. But it is a lot of finagling to get around formatting limitations.
I’ll email you the score - maybe I’m overlooking something obvious.
At the beginning of the Full score, you could add brackets spanning all of the instruments held by each player. Then add sub-brackets to the marimba staves for Players 2 and 3. Finally, go to Library > Layout Options > Brackets and Braces and change the Secondary bracket appearance to Brace. Then measures 3 and 4 could look like this:
Each player group should contain only one single player holding all of the instruments for that group. To show staves for all of the instruments in the Full score layout, go to Library > Layout Options > Players > Instrument Changes and uncheck Allow instrument changes. By having only one single player in each group, measures 41 and 42 in the Player 1 layout can look like this after moving the rehearsal mark and instrument change label in engrave mode:
Hi johnkprice -
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried this:
- Create 4 players and add the instruments to the players
- Create 4 player groups and add one player to each group
- Reset all layouts to factory defaults
- Unchecked Allow instrument changes
- Created a “condensed” layout which is same as Full Score except has Hide Empty Staves
The parts do look better - like your picture above. However, I cannot figure out any way to add brackets spanning all the instruments held by each player. It still looks like my picture above. - the brackets are around players 1 & 4, but not players 2 or 3 (which have the marimba)
I’m attaching a chopped down project file. I appreciate the effort you’ve put into this - but no good deed goes unpunished - maybe you can point me in the right direction to get the brackets around players 2 and 3.
Multiple Players Multiple Instruments.dorico.zip (1.3 MB)
Follow these steps for the Full score layout:
- Switch to engrave mode.
- Make a marquee selection around the bar rests in the first measure for all staves associated with Player 2.
- At the bottom of the left panel, click the button to insert a bracket.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for Player 3.
- Make a marquee selection around the bar rests in the first measure for both Marimba staves associated with Player 2.
- At the bottom of the left panel, click the button to insert a sub-bracket.
- Repeat steps 5 and 6 for Player 3.
- Go to Library > Layout Options > Brackets and Braces and change the Secondary bracket appearance to Brace.
That works. Thanks! I learned something new today - adding bracketing in Engrave mode. That bracketing also works with my original approach above. Your approach has the advantage that the parts are a bit more “Dorico like” and first assigning multiple instruments to each player then creating the Player groups is also closer to Dorico semantics.
That said, I consider this approach (as well as mine above) to be a rather large kludge. To turn off “Allow instrument changes” when that is the very opposite of what you are actually doing is counter intuitive. And having to create a whole additional layer of Player groups simply to display both the player & the instrument is not obvious.
I’m gonna mark this as solved.
John’s post should get the Solution check mark, not your own post. (You can change it.)
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Hey Mark Johnson - I’m learning all sorts of new stuff here. If I wanted to be pedantic, the solution is scattered amongst several posts, but that post was the final part - so done. Thanks for the tip.
Yes, many times it is hard to choose just one post! The best choice is the one that’s the most informative. Notice it gets quoted right below the OP at the top.
