Drums on Dorico 5: Lack of flexibility between layers?

Dorico
1

Hello!
I’m writing for drums and although I love how you can edit the drum kit, I find that a single configuration doesn’t work for a whole workflow for me.
For example: in some bars floor tom 1 is doing the same as the snare, or at least works in the same subdivision so I can program floor tom 1 and snare in the same layer while keeping the Kick drum and hi-hat in another Layer. But in some other bars within the same flow I snare and floor tom are working in different subdivisions so I need the floor tom to be working in a different layer than the snare.
Is it possible to change the layers in which any instrument belongs in the middle of a piece and how?
A possible solution that comes to my mind although doesn’t seem very elegant is duplicating or triplicating the floor tom with different layers and up/down beam orientation, and then writing the music as needed at every specific bar.

Thank you very much in advance!

2

In Dorico’s jargon, there’s no such thing as layers. There are upstem and downstem voices. You are right that you can duplicate or triplicate your instrument in the kit editor, and prior v.4 there was a very convenient workaround that involved “extra voices”— kind of exceptional voices not padded with rests. I’m not sure they still exist, though I can’t imagine the team wasting time deleting a working tool. Maybe that’s a way you could explore (select notes, invoke the context menu> Percussion> change to extra upstem voice?)
Apologies if this doesn’t work anymore.

3

What Marc suggests should still work just fine. Set up your kit so that the default setup is as you imagine it should be for most of the piece. You can then, on a note-by-note basis, move notes into other voices by selecting them, right-clicking and choosing Percussion > Change Voice and then choosing the new destination voice.

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