Guitar—change tunings between flows

Dorico
#1

Let’s say you have a project for electric guitar tuned to E standard and it contains five flows. Except, in flow three (and only flow three) you need a guitar in Drop D instead of E standard. For now I can use instrument changes, but that feels clunky as its not an actual instrument change, but just retuning the same guitar. Using instrument changes also runs into problems with Dorico’s automatic numbering of instruments, as there’s still only one guitar in the real world but two in the software.

Will it be possible to change the tuning of the same guitar between flows? Or will instrument changes remain the solution for this?

#2

For classical guitar you would just see system text E to D or D to E at the beginning of the flow. Anything lower than E would show as out of range but no other impacts

#3

I’m guessing you want to see the Tab too?

Speaking only my own opinion:

I wouldn’t be retuning a guitar that drastically in a performance if I could help it. Knowing me, something would eventually go wrong or I would hold things up. I WOULD have two guitars. The instrument change underneath the same player works really well for me. But we all have our preferences.

#4

Instrument changes will remain the solution for this.

#5

That’s what I thought, and it makes sense except for the automatic numbering. Any suggestions for dealing with the player numbers? If I have 3 guitars that need to change tunings (and thus require instrument changes), I get this in the score:

Guitar Tunings.jpg
Guitar Tunings.jpg1408×1476 106 KB

when I actually want just 1–3 on both flows.

#6

There’s no perfect solution for this at the moment, unfortunately (in future we plan to add an option to allow you to specify whether an instrument should be numbered), but for the time being you can edit the name of the instrument so that it is in some way different from the other instrument (e.g. with one or more leading or trailing spaces), and that will fool Dorico into thinking they’re different enough not to be numbered sequentially.

#7

Good to know you have plans for that. Will do the workaround for now. Thanks for your help.