In Phil Rothman’s article on the Sibelius blog, he reports that Daniel states the following about Dorico:
“If we make Dorico so that you have to extract parts, we messed up.”
As an example, if I’m engraving a score that has two flute players in the woodwinds, with Flute 2 doubling on piccolo - the score would have the following staves which are shown as needed:
Piccolo
Flute 1
Flute 2
Flutes 1 & 2 (for unison “a2” notes and/or when vertical space is an issue)
So, does this mean that Dorico will create the parts and I don’t have to? And not have to create a second file for just the creation of parts?
The whole idea behind Dorico’s way of thinking about music is that your score would not need to have separate staves for when the flute music can be shown on a single stave, or indeed when the flute player puts down her flute and picks up her piccolo. You can read more (intentionally slightly cryptic) information about that here:
It’s a wonderful concept, but I’m not sure if it will work for me.
A typical scenario: 8th-note triplets against 32nd-notes: common enough in music after 1900. Of necessity, in a full score the triplets are spread far more widely than in the individual parts, and in such a situation computer programmes space the triplets irregularly: mathematically exact, but unpleasing to the eye. So in my scores, I often tweak the horizontal spacing of longer note-groups to even them out. In the parts, of course, the spacing has to be reset.
If Dorico keeps everything in one file, will I still be able to get the best of both worlds?
Daniel, maybe a quick example would give us an idea how it could work.
Let’s take the given example of 2 Flute players - this time male
Both need their own part - so there will be a flute 1 and a flute 2 as parts.
In the score both instrumentalists are combined in one staff as flute 1/2 - in fact 2 players share one staff in the score.
The playback of course triggers 2 separate engines/instruments based on the fact that both flutes need their own articulation control as well as manually adjusted humanizing such like different startpoints, velocity, tuning etc… (sometimes the flute 1 plays a trill while the flute 2 plays staccato in 8th)
Yes, you’ll be able to freely adjust the rhythmic spacing in each layout independently of the other, so this would be no problem. I find it interesting that you find the mathematically correct spacing of tuplets produced by computers preferable to the irregular spacing characteristic of hand engraving; my impression is that the latter was produced out of pragmatism rather than aesthetics. For complex tuplet ratios it is easier to add on a fixed notehead width rather than to produce correct interpolated spacing, particularly when working with spacers of a fixed aperture.
You will certainly have to adjust the spacing by hand if you want to reproduce that kind of irregular tuplet spacing. I thought even SCORE produced mathematically correct interpolated spacing in such situations, so perhaps you have been used to making these kinds of adjustments for many years!
You would have two players, each holding his own flute. You would input the music for these two flutes on separate staves, which would produce separate parts. Each flute’s playback can be directed to separate endpoints (e.g. separate channels on the same device, or different devices, or whatever). I’m not able to talk about the production of a single stave in the score containing the music for both flutes just at the moment.
How does the “players holding instruments” model handle things like the leader of an orchestra, who is mostly playing with the rest of the section, but occasionally playing a solo line? Would you have to add the leader as a separate player in setup mode?
Daniel, I never worked with Score, but have for years been following the guidelines laid down in the Score handbook, as required by my publisher. Also, I prefer ‘pragmatic’ spacing, as you call it, to the mathematically correct variety. The attached example, produced with Product B (or was it Product A?), illustrates the point. Whatever the case, I’m delighted to hear that Dorico will be able to handle this.
As we discussed, there is a need to produce transposed versions of some brass instruments for concert band use and publication. Will there be a way to achieve this without the ability to extract parts? Will it be a case (I hope not!) of including all transposed parts in the score and hiding them? Any other solution?
When we prepare a score we operate two versions: the conductor’s score version and a “part” version. The Part version has many different elements and layout options to the score - i.e. collapsed voices written in chords in the score for doubling staves etc, abbreviations in the parts (semi-quavers, scrubbing etc). We also use the “Part” score to generate and distribute cues which we don’t wish to have displayed in the conductor’s score.
How will Dorico cope with cues and changes in notation between the score view and part view?
The copy house I work for uses ONLY extracted parts. Mainly because when a score comes in, whether it is a TV or Movie cue or a score for a live performance, we have 5 or 6 copyists take care of the parts which allows us to turn the cue around very quickly, often to go straight to the stage while the session is in progress. In Sibelius we achieve this by creating an extraction score with our house style, staves combined etc… and each copyist can extract their part(s). In Finale we create a score with certain elements of our house style and a parts template which contains our house style. The copyists then copy and paste their parts into the template. Which method are we going to be able to use with Dorico? If we can’t extract parts then we have to have a separate parts template with the correct number of measures and our house style elements in, correct?
What’s wrong with File > Export Flows, and then make sure you export each Layout separately? There’s a tick box for that.
edit: I reread your post and see that I’ve not answered your question at all.
I’ve also reread the thread and see that you’ve resurrected a two-year old thread that predates Dorico v1.0’s release!
It strikes me that the most obvious way to do what you want to do is to:
Setup a score in Dorico, including setting up your score “house style”. Do whatever you like with combined staves etc. We’ll call this scoretemplate
Setup a separate file for parts “house style”. We’ll call this partstemplate
Type all your music into scoretemplate.
Add an extra instrument (any instrument you’re not actually using - Gamelan?) to the file (and to the flow) but leave it empty.
Go File > Export Flows and tell it to Export Layouts as separate files. Then tell it you only want to Export the Gamelan Layout.
Open your partstemplate and import the Gamelan part you previously exported. This should give you the structure of the piece: time signatures, key signatures, tempo changes, odd barlines etc., but no notes, with the parts house style you previously set up.
Distribute this file and the score file to the copyists and they should be able to copy and paste between one and the other.
The only caveats are:
You may need to experiment with WHAT you copy and paste - Filters can be combined to deselect Elements that you don’t want to copy and paste - there may be consequences if you try to paste a selection that includes a time signature into another file that already has a time signature in place, for example.
You may find that it’s simpler to just Export Flows (separate layouts) and then import them straight into your part template, rather than copying and pasting between two files.
TL;DR - Dorico doesn’t do “house styles” or “libraries”, but those sorts of settings are saved within each project file. It’s easy to Export the musical content from Project A and import it into Project B. That way you get the musical content of Project A inheriting the layout/design/font choices from Project B.
Thinking further about this: if you separate the score and parts in the way you’re accustomed, the one thing you’ll lose is Dorico’s excellent Cues. It’s entirely possible to Copy, Paste, Scale down to cue size and manually add text (e.g. Vln 1) but a shame not to be able to take advantage of Dorico’s built-in functionality - which dynamically mirrors the music in another instrument.
Hopefully it’s a small price to pay for the ability to share the work between multiple copyists.
Why not just set up house styles in the master document and then just give each copyist a copy of the date-stamped master document (flow by flow if necessary) to clean up the relevant part(s) for printing? The copyist will have all the other parts available (for cues, etc.) but need only work on and print the part in question.
Thank you pianoleo for your thoughtful and detailed responses. I was already heading towards to two separate files and import the appropriate flow from the score to the parts file. I do need to do some more experimenting with what elements to include and what not to include. I want to find a “stable” solution for our office’s workflow as it will ultimately be me that has to show the team how to do this! I appreciate you taking the time to help me with this.
