Help with Conga setup

Dorico
1

Hi all,
I need to have a single line staff with pitches above and below the line for the conguero. By default, the individual conga staves have a fixed pitch on the line, and the Congas instrument is a 2-line staff. Playback would be nice but I’m on a deadline so notation is more important. I’m fine with just creating another staff for playback later that doesn’t appear in the score if I can get the notated staff to appear correctly.

Basically I need the staves to be able to do this (from pg 66 in Solomon’s “How to Write for Percussion”)

Is there another single line instrument that supports this type of notation? Is there a way to do this in Edit Percussion Kit? Is there a way to hack the instruments.xml file to allow this? Any advice on how to accomplish this very common type of percussion notation? I stupidly saved the work on the percussion staves for last on this orchestral piece. It’s due in hours and now I’m sort of stuck, thanks!

2

Have a look at how the Tabla instrument is defined. Create a tabla kit instrument, then in Setup mode, select the instrument and do Edit Percussion Kit, select the Tabla daya and press Edit Percussion Playing Techniques and you’ll see how it can be mapped to different noteheads on, above or below the line.

3

Thanks Paul, but I’m not quite following you. As soon as I create the tabla kit instrument, it has two staff lines, just like the conga kit instrument. How do I get it to just appear with one staff line?

4

edit: this post was redundant.

5

If you just want a single line then create a new ‘Tabla daya’ instrument. Enter a few notes and use alt-shift to see how you can map each notehead type and position to a different playing technique.

6

Thanks, I’m getting closer but still haven’t quite got it. Variations of this is what I actually need to do:

I’ve gotten as close as this, but can’t quite figure out how to move the Quinto notes above the staff line:

How do I tell Dorico which notes go above and which below? Do I assign Playing Techniques to each note?

7

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with percussion, but from what I recall, you need to add an entry in the Percussion Instrument Playing Technique editor for each position + notehead combination. Assuming you just want the regular (open?) notehead and slap for the above and below positions then you’ll need 4 entries. Set the slap ones to issue the ‘Slap’ playing technique. To enter notes use alt-shift- up/down to cycle between all the notehead+position combinations.

8

When you’re in input note mode (shift-N), alt-up/down arrow allows you to select which technique defined in the Percussion editor will be entered when you press y key.
I don’t understand why all your notes are below the line…

9

Ah, of course. Thanks Paul and Marc! I’ve got it working now.

10

One more question I couldn’t figure out yesterday … I have a single line percussion staff and now have no problem with adding notes above and below the line, but how do I have both above and below together? Basically trying to do this:

The add interval popover doesn’t work with percussion, and it seems like I can’t even add another voice here. Any ideas what I’m doing wrong? How do I accomplish this?

11

Input one “pitch”, then take the caret back, hit Q to turn on chord entry mode, Alt+Shift+Up/Down to get to the other “pitch” and enter again. On this second pass you’ll need to advance the caret manually. Bear in mind that once you have the first “chord” you can hit R to repeat, slide it around with Alt+arrows and Shift+Alt+Arrows to lengthen or shorten.

12

Perfect! Thanks as always Leo!