How to best import combined drum/percussion from Finale - XML

Dorico
1

I would love some advice from people importing XML (in my case from Finale) into Dorico - particularly when it comes to percussion/drum parts that combine pitched and unpitched percussion/drums.

I have a combined drum/percussion part in Finale, where the player plays drums, as well as pitched instruments such as Glock, and other percussion instruments like bell trees, shakers, etc. all on one staff.

Currently, I’ve set up my Dorico template to have a player that holds all of these instruments, and was planning on just copying from the raw imported file into the correct instrument lanes for each corresponding percussion instrument. This works well for non-pitched and drum parts (Dorico is really accurate in imports the drums), but I haven’t found a good solution for the pitched instruments, other than completely re-entering them. That is because Dorico has already split each ‘pitch’ to different percussion lanes/instruments in the bars where I originally had a single pitched instrument. If I try to copy these notes into the Glock line for example - they will copy over as one pitch (which makes sense, since Dorico sees all those notes as various drum or percussion hits, I guess it has no idea what pitch information there is).

Does anyone have advice on how they’re handling importing combined percussion/drum staves?

Is there a way to force Dorico to ‘see’ some sections in my raw imported file as pitches and not seperate percussion instruments?

Thanks in advance.

2

Can you try Paste into Voice? Or Paste while the caret is active?

3

Thanks so much @benwiggy - unfortunately, I can’t seem to get that to work - it pastes as one unison note in the Glock part. Meanwhile, Dorico has already split the imported Glock part into separate up and down stem voices, so pasting your second option only pastes part of the line.

I’ve tried some settings in the original Finale score to see if I can get better results. If I change the staff in Finale to a “blank staff” instead of a percussion, then it imports into Dorico with the pitch information intact and copyable (but all of the non-pitched percussion no longer imports correctly). For now this is what I’m doing to convert (creating two versions of an export), but was hoping there might be an easier way. Thanks again.

4

Percussion is my weak spot – though I’m hoping to improve on that soon with various projects…

Perhaps someone else can provide some light.