Getting one staff to play multiple instruments

Dorico
1

Hello! Brand new Dorico user, after using Finale for 30 years. My main use of Finale was to create rehearsal tracks for singers. I did this by using an obscure “Dump” expression type that told Finale to play the music in a staff on a second channel, which I could manually tune to whatever instrument I want. That way I get the emphasized part with a sustained tone and a percussive attack. Then I make a recording, and shift my “Dump” expression to a different staff, and repeat.

Any ideas on how to do something like this in Dorico? My guess is that I would want to make a special “Emphasize” player with a special instrument (I like electric piano). First I would tell the “Emphasize” player to double the Soprano part, then make a recording. Then I would tell the “Emphasize” player to double the Alto part, and make another recording. And so on.

Please let me know if you have any ideas, or if you need me to clarify what I’m looking for. I’m also open to doing this whole thing a different way, but I would like to not have to copy music from one staff to another for each recording.

2

Welcome to the forum @dfoster!

I read your post a few times before replying and so I hope I haven’t confused anything.

Maybe you could temporarily change the channel that the Alto Sax (for example) is routed to, to the E.P. channel?

I can’t think of a simpler way but there are some workaround kings here, so you might be in luck!

3

Thanks for the reply! But what if I want the same music to play on both Alto Sax and EP?

4

One option is to use Independant Voice Playback. This means you can have different voices sent to different channels. You could create a second staff to your Sax, and then easily copy the music to that staff (3-4 keystrokes), then change it all to a second voice.

This is obviously complicated - far more complicated than just copy/pasting between the two instruments (in my opinion).

5

And another thing:

It would be relatively simple to have a dummy layout containing the EP and the second instrument. All you would need to do is reassign the desired instrument to that layout and copy/paste.

You can also assign a key command(s) to the Duplicate to staff above/below function so the copy/paste bit is one click.

Then: select the notations in the Sax staff > Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+A a few times to Select More (which, after a few presses, selects all of that notation in the flow) > use the key command previously mentioned. The whole copy/paste saga would be over in about 5 seconds, using no mouse clicks.