I’m looking for an efficient way to notate divisi à 3 spanning both violin sections in Dorico.
I have 24 total violin players (12 in Vln 1, 12 in Vln 2). For certain passages, I need to divide them into three equal groups of 8 players each to harmonize a melody in three voices - essentially a true divisi à 3 across both sections combined.
I created three violin players (Vln I, Vln II, Vln III) in Setup mode and grouped them under “Violins” to get the bracket shown in the attached image. This works visually for the div. à 3 sections.
In divisi à 3 sections: what’s happening now doesn’t work visually, I need to show only the “Violins” group label with bracket, while hiding the individual “Violin I”, “Violin II”, “Violin III” staff labels
when the divisi a 3 ends, I need to hide the group bracket and revert to standard Vln I and Vln II labels, with Vln III staff hidden (using “Hide empty staves”, if that is possible without hiding the other instruments in the score)
It appears Dorico doesn’t currently support hiding individual instrument labels per system, or showing only group labels while hiding individual member labels within that group. The system break “Staff labels” property affects all instruments globally on that system.
Has anyone found a workaround for this type of notation? I’d appreciate any suggestions on how to achieve this efficiently without excessive manual text placement.
The usual way would be to divide both Vln1 and Vln2 into three and give each division the same music (Vln1-1 = Vln2 -1 etc.). Dorico handles this elegantly.
It’s possible by creating a separate group of 3 violins and giving them different names to avoid numbering (different full names, and a single space for abbreviated names). The tricky part is making it work for the part layouts. You can create divisi into 3 in both Violins staves at those spots and manually hide the staves in the score.
Insert a System Break at the start of these systems. Then select the System Break Signpost and press Enter (or double-click it). The Manual Staff Visibility dialog will show up:
