Hey, everyone! I’m working on a film scoring template, and I’m trying to sort out a streamlined method of using percussion in the score.
Here are my criteria: I want to have two five-line percussion staves with the option to have many players assigned to each. I want player labels to automatically appear above every instance of a percussion entrance.
So far, I have run into these issues. I can create a kit with several players without a problem, but player labels don’t appear above the entrances. So if I simply add the instruments to the player instead, the staff changes from 5 lines to 1 line.
Any thoughts on how I can get the best of both worlds?
I’ve attached an example below from a film score. This is the style I want to emulate.
I’m not sure if there is an automatic way to create the Instrument Labels but you could add them yourself as text? I can’t remember if there is a paragraph style already or if I’ve just created my own for this purpose!
I’ve made a nice little boxed text paragraph style for manual label entry, but I was hoping Dorico would have a way to add them in automatically. Oh well.
I think maybe you hit upon the key actually. You have a couple of players that are responsible for playing more than one instrument and the labels you are looking for are instrument changes rather than player changes?
That way Dorico will take of all the work, no? It also forces you to think about the logistics, i.e. not have one player play 3 instruments at the same time. Maybe I don’t get your question.
But I’m trying to replicate the look of the score like the screenshot in the original post. That’s how JoAnn Kane Music Service does their percussion on scores, and I’m preparing music for similar clientele who are used to that sort of layout.
I could always put everything in manually to the five-line staff, but I was wondering if there was some sort of automatic process that would handle the instrument labels every time I put an entrance for a new instrument on the staff.
I think he just wants to have two players (grouped or not), with 5-line staves, that have n instruments each, with an automatic Instrument Change Label in their staves before each entry of a different instrument. To my knowledge, this isn’t possible by default.
You COULD have automatic Instrument Change Labels, but you would need to live with the staff type changing from single-line to 5-line wherever necessary, as well as a “To [instrument]” label after an instrument’s last note.
A potential workaround for this: customise a 5-line instrument to whatever you like eg edit the information of a Cowbells (plural) stave to that of a Bass Drum. This way, all the instruments would appear the same and have automatic Instrument Change Labels. (you would need to hide the “To [instrument]” label in the score if necessary.
I’d really love to see this style of percussion grouping/labeling implemented. Also having a preference to repeat the abbreviated names in parenthesis on every page spread when instruments don’t change would be great.
There is a relatively easy way to get the labels.
Basically, you can transform every individual instrument into an individual Kit, place it as you like in the 5 line system and do this with every percussion instrument in your line-up, name each Kit accordingly etc. Then you can have the individual players hold several of these “single instrument kits” and you will get the automatic labeling from Dorico when the player is changing from one to the other. So basically instead of several single instruments, the player holds several kits that contain a single instrument each.
This involves a bit moving around of instruments between players when setting up the kits but apart from that works flawlessly.
I haven’t tried yet whether the new instrument editor allows for them to be stored easily for later use but I imagine this should be possible.
It kind of works and it’s not the most tedious thing I’ve done in Dorico. It still requires a lot of manual adjustments though and I’d like some of that to be taken care of automatically because it’s easy to make mistakes when things are moving fast.
