Hey everyone, I’m working on making a rehearsal score for a fairly long musical. It is likely going to end around 30 individual songs (counting reprises and transitions). It’s definitely going to be hundreds of pages. I’ve heard that it’s recommended to use one project and have each song be its flow.
However, I’m worried (because of previous traumas in other software) about work being lost or the project loading slowly because of the mass amount of pages. Has anyone used the flow features with very long projects and care to tell me about their experience?
The only real concern is Dorico will get slower as the amount of musical information gets larger and larger. This depends more on the number of actual staves/notes rather than duration. A dense score will display sluggishness sooner than a longer, less dense score.
There are some things that can be done to mitigate this, such as turning off auto condensing while you’re entering the music info. Entering notes only in galley mode seems to help a little.
One option would be to keep a single project and not worry about it until it becomes an issue, in which you can start a 2nd project, perhaps a project per act, if necessary. Another approach would be a project per number while working, and then you could import all the flows to a single project when complete.
There’s not really a best way, just a best way for how you work.
Welcome to the forum! The longest work I’ve done in Dorico was for a ballet orchestra a year ago that was approx. 50 minutes, 20 movements, score was 173 pages. A few comments based on that experience:
I kept each movement separate during the working stage, then combined everything into one project at the end to create parts. This meant that speed was not a concern during most of the editing process and everything worked quickly. You’ll need to be very thoughtful about how you want to set up your default template though. Even though I was very detailed, the composer changed some of the percussion allocations as he wrote, and I ended up needing to do quite a bit of percussion proofreading and editing when I combined files. Strings, woodwinds, and brass all combined easily though.
Speed is definitely an issue once you combine files, especially if you’ll be using Condensing. Make sure you have a recent system that is fast enough. Many processes have do be done sequentially so single-thread speed is really important. Daniel had a post about this here. I was using an AMD 5950x setup at the time and it still had some lag once everything was combined. The new Apple chips are really fast at this though and I’ve since switched to an M4 Max.
Depending on the orchestra size, make sure you have plenty of RAM too. If the composer/arranger requires mockups, you can eat up a lot of RAM with many different high quality VSTs hosted. If you run out of RAM, then things will really slow down.
If you’ve created mockups of individual movements during the “working” stage, you can switch to the Silence playback template for the full score with everything combined and things will go much faster. As long as you’ve thoughtfully set up your playback template, it’s easy to just reload it too.
Dorico did a fantastic job with the parts once everything was combined. The ability to have multiple flows on a page works great and gives you more flexibility as you hunt for page turns. I don’t know if your rehearsal schedule allows for waiting to combine files for the finished project or if you’ll need individual movements available for rehearsal as you go, but waiting to combine was really great for optimizing layout and page turns.
I’m not sure what other software you have experience with, but Dorico’s cue feature is fantastic for this type of work too.
As this is your first post, I obviously have no idea how well you know the program, but make sure you know it really well before attempting a project of that size. Obviously some workflow things like avoiding any page overrides until the very end of your layout work is essential. If you’ve used the program for any length of time I’m sure you already know that, but just mentioning it in case you are considering switching to Dorico. I didn’t really do any layout work in the “working” projects, and waited until I had combined all the files at the end for that.
With the way Dorico handles additional front matter pages as overrides, I think it’s better to create them separately in InDesign or another program and then combine the PDFs, but others may disagree.
As there are lots of cuts and inserts in musical theater work, Dorico is great with strange bar numbering scenarios too.
I’ve done an opera of 276 pages, with 97 Flows, and 30 Players, though most were not in every flow. That was perfectly manageable as one document, with no noticeable slowness. Mind you, I wasn’t using Condensing, and the notation was relatively straightforward.
I’ve also done a project with over 600 Flows, though each one was only 14 bars long (86 pages), and only for piano! That began to slow down after about 500 or so..!
I don’t see any need to work with separate documents at any stage. At worst, you can just have a ‘working’ Layout, and only select the current Flow.
My longest Dorico project to date is a full length opera that came in at 9 flows, 327 pages. Full orchestra, 2 choirs, 13 soloists, with condensing. Speed was definitely affected, so I ended up splitting it into two separate project files. I just imported all the same settings and set the correct page number at the start of the 2nd file. It was still a bit slower than I would have liked (especially after activating condensing), but perfectly manageable. I didn’t combine into one project for the parts—just combined the PDFs after export.
Also FWIW, I did the piano/vocal in a completely separate file, which worked well for this project since that was where the bulk of big musical edits were made after the workshop before even starting the full score. If you wanted, you could create a custom layout for the piano/vocal and keep everything together in one project.
(I am on my telephone, so I can’t test it for myself at the moment):
If - as an example - you have a project with three flows, the first one being solo piano, the second one full orchestra, the third one with solo piano again:
Create a layout consisting of flow 1 and flow 3 only.
If you work on that solo piano layout and close Dorico: once you re-open it again it will probably only load the necessary audio content for the solo piano.
Would creating a “working layout” (or several) that did not include the flows in progress be the equivalent. A comletely separate layout containing all flows, if not opened, could preserve all your work while you used the abbreviated layout.
I am a fan of keeping the rehearsal piano part as a hidden instrument in the overall document.
I had a score that was c. 300 pp long, and when I sent it to NYC for printing, the printer recommended splitting the score into two volumes, so I was interested that you did the same.
Oh sure, I haven’t actually used them but they have a great reputation. I’ve used Copycats in midtown a bunch too as they are used to doing oversized and Broadway stuff.
