This feature request addresses the use case of a vocal / theatrical piece, where you have many characters/roles/actors/singers that are named based on theatrical piece (not their voice type). Examples includes operas and musical theater.
In that kind of situation, since different characters will commonly converse between each other (and not necessary sing all together) it’s common to try to use as few staves as possible, and “change” the character on the same staff, like so:
Currently, there are two ways to achieve this in Dorico:
Create as many vocal instruments as you need (so you have more than one staff if you need it), and manually choose which staff to put each character to save on staves whenever possible.
Use the “multiple instrument for one player” feature.
Both of these “workarounds” are not ideal for separate reasons, which is why I believe Dorico should have a more native way to support this usecase, or expand on the “multiple instrument for one player” feature with settings that will enable it to behave well for multiple characters. Below is a detailed explanations of the shortcomings of these workarounds:
Option 1: Assign Staff and Labels manually
Require manual text for character name changes which could break if:
a. You want to change a character name
b. the system break changes (it is necessary to re-indicate characters in system break if one character singing becomes two characters like in this example:)
The decisions to which staff to put each part in order to use as few staves as possible could depend on system breaks, and force you to use the same role in different staves depending on context of who sings before / after / during.
Could be much more complicated if you want to conserve consistency in order of the characters when they sing together. (Or, if you want to make it so that lower harmonies are always in a lower staff)
Option 2: Use the “multiple instrument for single player” feature
If there isn’t any switch (i.e. if a new character joins and already existing character, there is no indication as to what character joins, and which staff is for which character. In that example it’s unclear who should sing each part:
The “To X” warnings areredundant here, because it’s not actually the same performer switching an instrument. Current, there is no way to globally suppress those without manually hiding each one.
Lyrics are handled poorly when collapsed into one staff:
It’s not collapsing to fewer staves if it can’t do exactly one:
In that example the material could have easily fit in two staves as there is
never more than 2 voices at the same time.
It’s impossible (to my understanding) to take advantage of the condensing feature, as condensing groups require you to select different players , not instruments. That workaround requires us to put all vocal characters in the same “player” so it wouldn’t work. Here’s an example where that would have been useful:
It’s impossible to set what characters participate in any specific flow, which makes writing very difficult if you have many characters in the entire show.
It’s also possible that there are other consideration when condensing in this case that I can’t think about at this moment.
This seems like a job for condensing. Multiple instruments per player doesn’t fit contextually as each vocalist is a player. The condensing feature is what’s used to put multiple players onto a single staff. I don’t deal with vocal music, but I can see how these particular needs aren’t covered currently. The player labels would need to be assignable to be able to handle names rather than just be numbers. Positioning of the labels could also use some help here, lest the user need to place each one manually.
I tried using this with condensing but even though it’s conceptually similar, it seems like that in its current state, it’s not a very good workaround. Here’s an example:
Here are the issues with it:
The short version of the names is used instead of the full name. This is easy to workaround by defining the short names to be identical to the long names:
The main issue: it treats it as multiple voices of the same part, so you get:
a. rests for the other voice which clutters the score
b. flipped stems, names, and lyrics
c. Redundant double stems when they sing together (I would want it to write “BUZZ & NEIL”)
Condensing doesn’t work well when I add a third character:
In that case (at least for the first system) it’s clear that there is no need for two staves.
Here’s how this part should look like:
Though not ideal (As described above) the “multiple instruments with a single player” approach works better for this use case. Though I agree that it would be “anti-pattern” because it’s not the “same player”. Perhaps there is a different way of modeling it.
Most, if not all, the issues you raise can be addressed by choosing the appropriate Notation Options>Condensing settings. Furthermore you can add Condensing changes at any point, to override the Notation options.
If the intent is to only have a single staff for all those parts for the duration of the project, perhaps. But if you want the flexibility of having multiple staves at points, for duets or other times singers are singing simultaneously, that doesn’t seem conducive to me.
You are wrong (you and I are becoming antagonistic for some unknown reason).
This is not one player, multiple instruments. It is multiple players needing to condense in different formations.
I apologize for sounding too negative. It has been a long week, and I had only skimmed the OP before my first reply. But I still disagree and I stand by my statement.
Multiple solo vocal roles generally alternate on a staff, especially in a piano/vocal score, labeled when the staff changes role, somewhat (but not exactly) like when a player switches from flute to piccolo. When simultaneous vocal parts are to appear on one staff, they are written that way, in multiple voices.
Condensing is for combining multiple players of the same instrument who need their separate part layouts; singers get at least a piano/vocal score including all the voice parts. (I can think of a few exceptions.)
I think the point is that the existing feature set just doesn’t support that very well. Condensing and multi-instruments players are both not the “correct” solution for this, but as I outlined in the original post, the latter is more suitable as a workaround because it’s closer (but as mentioned, not exactly the same thing).
I agree with @Mark_Johnson s comments on this thread.
Even though multi-instrument players are the “closest” for this behavior right now, it’s probably incorrect to use it as it’s fundamentally a different case (these are actually different performers).
I think it might be that a completely new feature should be available, probably as a layout option, that will automatically merge all “voice” players in that way. Similar to condensing, but with the behavior that is specific to this scenario. (as described in the original post)
This has the advantage of being able to include some of the players (i.e. characters/roles) for specific flows, which will make composing and transcription easier. (which is one of the issues with the multi-instrument players approach).
I think the condensing approach is structurally more in line with Dorico’s architecture.
Each performer would naturally be a player with a particular voice type assigned.
The other key point is that staves in Dorico (in page view) are not fundamental, but are ‘generated’ based on the requirements (divisi, condensing etc). Obviously, sometimes staves are explicitly added, but that’s the general philosophy.
If you would like to explore further, have a look at condensing changes. I don’t know if they will meet your requirements, but they are very, very powerful - not only can you change the condensing rules from place to place, but you can change which instruments are condensed together, and how.
Sometimes condensing gives unexpected results, as you’ve found. It’s not always clear why things don’t condense and I think it would be a great feature for Dorico to be able to report the reasons.
One limitation is that the different singers/roles often involve different voice types that require clef changes. Currently, you can only condense identical instruments.
Playing Techniques might be one solution, as you only have to edit the name once for multiple instances in the score; and you could configure continuation lines (with no actual line) to repeat the text at system breaks.
I’ve been using Dorico for vocal music since the beginning, and I agree: there is no automatic solution that fills the needs. However, I find I can write out each singer as a separate player (which allows “parts”, and then create a staff or a group of staves where they are recombined from the individual players’. That is what would appear in a vocal score, for instance. While I would probably keep the individual lines for a full score. That’s the beauty of layouts. But it’s indeed way more work than having an automatic solution.
