Hello hello,
By default, a string section is supposed to play divisi by distributing its players evenly on each line, but the orchestrator may occasionaly wish to assign a specific number of players to a certain chord or line. This is fairly common in orchestral film scores.
The number of players is usually indicated in brackets before the note, like in “Early Days” from “Born on the 4th of July” by John Williams (engraved in MuseScore):
In bar 3, the Violin II section is expected to suddenly divide its players by allowing 6 of them to the higher note, 4 to the middle note and 4 again to the lower note, until otherwise specified. In case any of the section’s players were to be excluded, this could also be indicated (e.g. “5 desks”), or left to the discretion of the conductor, concertmaster or common sense as is the case in bar 4 where sub-section 1 is momentarily missing without notice.
I could be wrong, but I haven’t found anything useful about this in the documentation, YT channel or the forum. Creating a divisi seems the way to go, but the “Change Divisi” dialog doesn’t appear to allow the user to assign a number of players per sub-section, only their names.
Idea #1: We could take advantage of this by naming the 3 sub-sections “(6)”, “(4)”, “(4)” and arrange the position of these names in Engrave mode. Here’s what we get when Condensed mode is disabled:
But here’s what we get when Condensed mode is enabled:
All sub-section names have disappeared. Maybe there’s a way to let them show but I couldn’t find that option. That would be good solution though.
Idea #2: As a workaround, we could directly add a staff text to each note and adjust its position accordingly. This works fine as long as Condensed mode remains disabled:
But the moment we enable Condensed mode, the (supposedly) middle note number appears to be missing. I guess Dorico considers both “(4)” as identical and discards one. But as one might expect, the missing text would be displayed if it were different (e.g. “(5)”). Again, I may well have overlooked an option somewhere.
Idea #3: As a last resort, we could enter the notes as plain chords, add a staff text to each note and manually place them (as I did in MuseScore) like this:
It obviously works the same whether Condensed mode is on or off. But using voices to engrave a divisi is a real pain in the neck and, well, defeats the purpose of Dorico’s automated divisi system in the first place.
Hmm… did I miss something, an option perhaps? Or does anyone know a better way to solve this problem?