I have a Double Bass staff that I’ve split into divisi staves, upper for arco and lower for pizzicato.
Looks like there’s no way to get them to play properly as divisi staves, right? They’d need different “player” objects in order to support two different MIDI channels.
What’s the workaround for this? Having created two players, how can one fake the look of a divisi staff between them?
I don’t think there really is a practical workaround for this at present, I’m afraid. You don’t have sufficient control over bracketing and bracing or the positioning of staff labels to make this work.
OK, not a deal-breaker, in any case! I can carry on just fine, thank you. 
By the way, in the online documentation, I’m reading:
In Dorico, notes on a single staff may be played by different channels, depending on which playing techniques are provided by the patch assigned to each channel.
I don’t quite follow this. (Perhaps I am misreading the sentence.) How do the techniques provided by a patch (which I would normally take to mean key switches) generate changes in the channel employed by a staff?
What works for me:
Make independent play-back staves, and ‘filter them’ from view in page/engrave view. Mute, or direct your ‘visual’ staves to a dummy instrument that makes no sound.
Sometimes I only need a couple of articulations that require key-switches at the same time. I.E. Arco in a top voice, and pizzicato in a bottom voice, with both on a single divisi stave. In this case I’ll just make an exclusive pizzicato stave directly under the original as a fresh new player/instrument, copy the pizzicato notes to it using the ‘special paste’ feature, then use select filters to grab and mute the lower voice pizzicato notes in the originial stave above. From there, I’ll go into Engrave Mode, then ‘filter’ my special pizzicato stave. Once it’s filtered, it shows up in galley view, but goes away for page and engrave view; meanwhile, I can hear the proper pizzicato sounds during playback.
OK, Brian (hello, again!), so, the standard method of establishing a playback staff beneath the notation. I was hoping to avoid that; in Sibelius, I have enough control over the layout that I can easily pull of separate channels for divisi staves.
I really don’t want to manage a duplicate staff just for playback. That’s high maintenance. I prefer simply to split the basses into two staves for now, and to worry about engraving when the time comes; Dorico has made strides toward eliminating the need for a playback staff, hopefully we’ll get lucky in the near future and this won’t be an issue, as it isn’t in Sibelius.
I hear you. I’m pretty sure they have plans to allow each voice to have a unique channel at some point. Until we get that, this is how I’ve personally ‘worked around’ the problem.
I’m just encountering this problem now too. Is this going to be fixed in the next version of Dorico?
Since your divisi staves presumably use the same Player (and thus the same MIDI channel), they will likely both play pizz or both play arco until Dorico offers a way to send different voices to different MIDI channels.
Unless you need the instruments playing pizz and arco simultaneously, you should not need divisi.
It’s fairly common, at least in “light classical” orchestral arrangements, to have contrabasses divisi and playing two independent musical lines, one pizz and the other arco.
I know, but AFAIK Dorico is not set up to do that via divisi (at least not yet).