I’m working on port my compositions from Finale to Dorico.
I’m trying to port them to be in the dorico concepts for parts.
So in finale you create a staff for an instrument and then put each part in a different voice. And you can export the voice as a part.
My understanding for Dorico you make a player for each instrument and thus make 2 staffs then condense them for the score.
This seems like it should be a great solution but I’m have issues getting the score to look right.
First question is there away to make the first page of the score just say Bassoons and fix this:
Thanks that mostly worked, it still left the 1, 2 and extra bracket. Which again isn’t how scores normally look, but that tip did make an improvement.
Any info on the main issue with a2 and being able to fix that manually?
Dorico will always include the player numbers in staff labels for condensed instruments.
Dorico decides how music is condensed based on the whole phrase. Phrases are bounded by rests. If you want Dorico to consider a chunk of music that is not bounded by rests as a phrase, in order to produce a different condensed result, you can create a condensing change that is active for the group of instruments you’re concerned about, and that will allow Dorico to treat the music from that point as a new phrase.
There are excellent tutorials about condensing on our YouTube channel, so I suggest you take a few minutes to watch one or two of them if you haven’t already done so.
Hi @tfbsaxman, adding to Daniel’s suggestions, is always better, for condensing problems, to upload the project, to receive suggestions based on the particular context of your project.
OK So if someone else runs in to this the answer you are looking is:
There is a manual way to set set a condensing region to override Dorico’s best guess (which is based on rests as mentioned above).
You have to go into engrave mode. select the note you want to start a new region of the condensing rules. Then from the Engrave Menu select Condensing Change…
This will bring up a new dialog with tons of options, though you really don’t need to use any of this for this case to just start a new region.
Just check the condensed instrument group you want to start on new region on and click OK.
Dorico will now a2 combine the notes like you would expect.
And don’t get tricked like me with this option in Notion:
Having this selected as an option did not seem to do what it says cause if it did I would not have needed to manually create a new region it would have just condensed it mid-phrase. So I’m not sure what this option really does.
If you want to spend an hour of your time there more information here:
Some powerful stuff in there which is great, it not very obvious from the UI on how to do this. I could see a simple a2 UI feature in write mode in the panel to just drop in a a2 to reset a condensing region or popup over to set the range of the new region. I’m assuming this is a common issue with condensing.
The other thing that would be need to is first page override to remove the player numbers on the first page, and option to use Plural name instead so the score look more typical.
Yeah I can see how that is useful though this is a public site so it makes sharing hard. Since I sell this music for my living I can’t post in the public. I kind of asking Steinberg to make their github open to the public. I’ld have to make a new version that strips out most of the music or some alt-version. Seem the answer I was look for is quite straight forward. There is a manual way to set a2, just not intuitive from the UI how to do that and take hours of reach to figure out.
There is a (not very elegant) workaround for this (and with instrument changes it will be problematic):
in Setup mode, left panel, rename the Players that will be condensed with the number and their plural name (for example 2 Flutes for full name and Fl. as short name, for each flute player)
set the Player name as staff label for the full score in Layout options