First of all, congratulations on the new 3.5 update.
Second, I want to ask a question about dividing by stand. In Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (yes, the piece whose opening is used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in case anybody doesn’t know), Strauss specifies which music stands the strings are to be divided by, like in this screenshot I made with Snip & Sketch of the score from IMSLP.
Here, the divisi have instructions like “4. 5. 6. Pult” (pult being German for stand) near the instrument name, indicating that line is to be divided among the fourth, fifth and sixth stands. I was wondering if it was possible to replicate this in Dorico?
Right-click on the staff (make sure it’s a section player), and click Staff → Change Divisi… Click the “Add Section Division” button as many times as you need staves. Select each division and you can edit its label in the box right below.
Hi, thanks for the reply. It works, but I’ve run into a new problem.
The part of the score I’m looking at has the first stand across two staves, but when I put a divisi into a group, the instrument name (e.g. Violin I) disappears. How do I keep the instrument name?
There are various options for how staff labels should appear for divisi sections, both on the Staves and Systems page of Layout Options and in the Change Divisi dialog itself.
I have played around with the settings, but nothing helps my problem. To try to be clear, I want to create a divisi group with the name “1. Pult” while retaining both the group name and “Violin I” instrument name on the page.
Can you attach your project so we can take a look?
Anybody found a solution yet? Or is there no current solution?
Please don’t bump threads. You can see that the forum is at an exceptionally high level of traffic at the moment. I am doing my best to answer all of the threads here (including over the weekend) but I cannot always spend the time necessary to dig into a specific problem on every pass through the forum. I know it’s frustrating to have to wait for an answer, but I will come back to your thread when I have time.
OK, so I’ve had a chance to look at this now. I don’t think you can completely reproduce that appearance at the moment, because Dorico doesn’t have any understanding that “Pult.” means “stand” and so know that it can show this just once when it generates a combined staff label for the condensed divisions. The closest I think you can get (unless somebody cleverer than me can prove me wrong) is to remove the group names “1 Pult.” and “2.3.4.5. Pult.” and instead name each of the divisions e.g. “1 Pult.”, “2 Pult.”, and so on. This will then bring back the “Violin 1” label centred between the staves, but when the divisions are condensed, you’ll end up with labels like “1 Pult./2 Pult./3 Pult.” instead of “1.2.3. Pult.”.
I think the only way we’d be able to accommodate staff labels exactly like the original score would be to make it possible to define a kind of common suffix for each division, and have Dorico know how to append that correctly when the divisions are condensed. We’ll think about this, but I wouldn’t anticipate that we’ll be able to achieve any change of behaviour here immediately.
Sorry that you had to wait 24 hours for a reply to this enquiry. I hope it didn’t inconvenience you too greatly, particularly since the answer is that you can’t easily achieve exactly the result you want.
Don’t worry, I can live with it. The workaround you provided will do for now. I’m sorry for bumping the thread earlier, I am not a patient person.
