Hello!
I’m working on a score which came to me already in Dorico from the composer, my task being adapting it to the publishing house standards.
There is a single percussion player, thus equipped:
At a certain point, while playing the Vibraphone, the player is asked to also play the Bass Drum. In the screenshot below you can see that even if it is a single player, there are two staff labels. Why so?
Additionally, the (Vibraphone) and “Grosse Caisse” are text objects because the fact that the GC was starting to play was impossible to determine. Am I missing some settings for this?
Is there a way to have:
just a single Perc., possibly with a bracket encompassing all staves that may appear
have the instrument change stated on top of the new percussion? I believe the Layout Options > Players > Instrument changes settings are fine because they work well for other instruments.
I can accept a solution where I have to create a new player and move instruments in it so that it then works.
Thank you for your insight!
PS: if things are not evident I will cut down the project but it is … complicated, believe me!
The second staff is created because two instruments held by the same player have to be played at the same time. The only way to get those on the same staff would be by using a kit, but you can’t add pitched percussion instruments to a kit (because how would that even work with assigning staff lines etc.). So if they have to be on the same staff, the only way to achieve that that I can think of is by faking it using a downstem voice for the bass drum notes, possibly assigning them X noteheads to avoid confusion with the vib. part. You’d also have to position all vib. PT and dynamics above the staff.
With all the clutter that generates, I’d seriously consider keeping the second staff (if that’s up to you to decide). It keeps things legible, and to be honest I think reading from two staves would not be the most strenuous thing that is being asked of the player in this situation.
As for the instrument change label, I also add the first label as staff text because the only global setting I know of is to show the label at the beginning of the flow (and not at the entry of that instrument), but I might be wrong about that.
Thanks for chiming in!
They don’t have to be on the same staff, but they need to get only one staff label in the left margin, otherwise it looks like two players, which they are not.
What I would do in another program is to add an extra staff below the vibraphone, change the instrument only for that bar to tam-tam and then hide the staff again.
If I do that in Dorico, I get a 5-line staff, which would be great for me since I can write Tam-tam in the first space below staff; the publisher’s house-style, though, would not agree with me on this.
Unless there is some super-clever hack I am missing to get only one staff label in the margin, I think I will resort to edit these two pages only in Illustrator once the job is completed. I will delete one “Perc.” and move the other “Perc.” down (or up!).
I normally get Instrument Change Labels fine above the first entry of a new instrument, but it is possible that now that two instruments are playing together, Dorico doesn’t know which one to choose and politely decides not to show any.
The option for showing the ICL or ICWarnings are found in Layout Options > Players > Instrument Changes.
Yeah after I posted my reply I realised that you asked explicitly about the staff label, sorry about that. I’ve been messing around with that for the last half hour but I can’t get that to work, there have been requests about this in the past on the forum as well. It seems that the Illustrator option is the most efficient way to go here..
