FR: no sub-bracket for Violin 1+2

Dorico
1

Topic Condensing divisi and brackets reminds me that I’d like to submit the following FR:
In Layout Options / Brackets and Braces you can choose to use secondary brackets for instruments of the same kind within a bracketed group. This is very useful for e.g. woodwind in non-condensed passages.
But it is (in my view) not applicable to the normally very distinct Violin I and II groups, and it gets especially cumbersome if either (or both) groups have extra staves due to divisis. Then it becomes very unclear which staff belongs to whom. It would be better if both violin groups would behave separately, or at least to have an extra option to not join V I+II by secondary brackets by default, and only give them their own secondary brackets in case of divisi.
For a conductor, the main 5-staff string bracket on the bottom of an orchestral score is a safe reference point, it doesn’t need the secondary bracket for V I+II to tell her the people on the upper two staves all play the violin. No one considers them to be one big group of violins that happens to be split remarkably often. They are really two groups, often even sitting opposite each other, and each group should get their own sub-brackets, when needed.

Additional, and related, FR:
Currently, secondary brackets are shown on staves with the very same instruments, e.g. two staves of horns. I would like to extend this automatic bracketing to doubling instruments of the same family: flute with piccolo, oboe with English horn, bassoon with contrabassoon etc. After all, it’s often the same players that play the regular instrument a few pages earlier or later. And even if they don’t, they are ‘family’.

Both these features would vastly reduce the need to insert custom bracketing changes, which, TBH, I find a bit clumsy now, as you can only adjust them on actual system breaks — or maybe I’m doing it wrong… I would prefer to be able to insert a bracketing change anywhere (ideally only needed in exceptional cases), just like condensing changes inserted in the middle of a system often will effectuate on the next break only, be it manual or automatic.

Edit: This is exactly what Elaine Gould recommends (p. 518)
Edit 2: My apologies, I didn’t intend to actually bump, just wanted to add info I should have looked up right away…

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2

Thanks for the feedback. I agree concerning violins 1 and 2, and think we should have an option for this, and I’ll need to go back and refresh my memory on the point of bracketing dissimilar instruments in the same family. That would be difficult to achieve with the way things currently work, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t be worth considering in future.

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Thank you for considering!

4

I second this. I am working on a score with quite a bit of string divisi. I want a secondary bracket to join all the Vln I player staves and another to join all the Vln II player staves. Having one secondary bracket for all Violins is not particularly useful and also counter to common practice.
There also seems to be a mistake in the documentation. The bit on ‘Changing bracket grouping according to ensemble type’ sends the reader to ‘Approach’ under ‘Engraving Options’ in Engrave mode. That is actually under ‘Layout Options’ in Setup mode. Unless I’m missing something.

5

It’s possible that you’re looking at an older version of the documentation, @Headphonomenon. It’s unfortunately quite common that you end up looking at an older version by way of a Google search.

6

I was looking for an answer for this, but I’ve just come up with a workaround. It sounds a bit janky, but it works perfectly, at least as far as I can tell.

  1. Create a section player with a fiddle, and place it below the first violin. Noteperformer and probably most VSTs will treat it as a violin, but for Dorico it’s not the same instrument at all.
  2. Move all the music and divisi of the 1st violin to the fiddle.
  3. Delete the 1st violin.
  4. Manually rename the single violin part remaining as “Violin II” and the fiddle as “Violin I”.
4 Likes
7

This was a clever solution. Thank you very much! In any case, it would be nice to have the possibility to treat violins 1 and 2 as diferent instruments to allow automatic sub-brackets without (wonderful) workarounds like this :slight_smile:

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