Here to share another work composed with Dorico: Holy Saturday, a new composition I started sketching out on Ash Wednesday this year and wrote three separate orchestrations of, all in Dorico (flows were handy!):
for solo piano
for violin, viola, cello, and contrabass (not the standard string quartet, and for good reason)
for a small chamber orchestra: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, harp, tubular bells, and strings section
I recorded the piano version myself in our home, and then used Spitfire’s BBC Symphony Orchestra’s samples for the other versions, and mixed and mastered them all with a friend.
Dorico was, as ever, invaluable for this. One thing it got me mulling on is how to approach things like “arrangements” where the intent is for all of them to have the same melodies and harmonies and timing and whatnot to match, with just the instrumentation to differ—curious if folks here have found better or worse workflows for that. I spent a lot of time in split view making sure that I kept everything lined up across the three orchestrations as I made tweaks to those!
I would add all players for all the arrangements in one flow and have one “All players” score as well as one score for all the individual arrangements.
It depends, of course, on how many general differences you will have between those arrangements. If they are 100% structurally equal, this might be a way to go. One thing you might want to think about is how you will name two players that have the same instrument but play different notes in different ensembles. (Think “Clarinet 1” of the clarinet ensemble vs. “Clarinet 1” of the clarinet duet. You get the idea.)
That’s a neat idea. And then I could just use different layouts for the different versions of it. I may actually go back and update it to work exactly this way. The naming is tricky, given e.g. violin section vs. solo violin in a small ensemble; but I think that’s fine. The instrument name in the score just has to be clear.
This thread has an interesting discussion of the other bit I was thinking about: audio export. (TL;DR: move the layout to the top of the layouts list in Setup mode and Dorico will export that.) Given the final recording approach I took of actively performing all of the recordings, even if with samples, it wouldn’t matter for that final output, but it did matter for my “work-in-progress” passes.