I am working on arranging some hymns for TTBB in two staves - but am getting a bit overcomplicated with the stemming situation. I want the tenors to be stemmed together and the basses to be stemmed together except for when there is rhythmic divisi.
Does Dorico have a way of doing this kind of hymnal type stemming automatically? Right now I’m using two voices somewhat haphazardly depending on what direction I want the stems to go - but it seems awkward - I have to hide a lot of rests, and typing in lyrics is a pain.
I’m new to Dorico, having migrated from Finale (but I always had trouble with this in Finale too)
There are several ways to approach this. (Possibly some one will suggest another method EDIT: as you see in the posts below)
Here is a specific method using Reduce (click to expand)
One of them would be to write your music and lyrics on 4 separate players. Then for the tenor 1 and bass 1 flip the lyrics. Then you can copy the T1 and T2 music and lyrics, and do Paste Special into a single staff TT (this is an extra Tenor Player, with the instrument name renamed to TT). Then you can take care of the voices: use Select More in combination with V to assign the notes to the other voice. Same procedure for the two Basses.
Here the setup (when you are done you can uncheck the first 4 players from the full score layout):
I would enter the tenors on one staff (stemmed together) in one voice except where divergent rhythms made a second voice necessary, using remove rests to remove any undesired rests. I would do the same for the bass parts.
In essence, this is virtually the same way I would handle the situation in Finale.
Unless one needed different tenor or bass sounds assigned to each tenor or bass part, this would be the simplest way to arrange the score in hymnal style.
