How to start with doing a Score Reduction and Analysis

I think Dorico works reasonably intuitive to produce any kind of score. But what I currently struggle even to grasp a concept of where to start is doing a score reduction and analysis like they are popular on certain YouTube channels. For example this one:

This one is even described as a “test run with Dorico”, so, I suppose the guy is doing them in Dorico, now. 6 years ago he even produced a nice tutorial how to do these, but unfortunately with MuseScore at the time:

Most of the concepts presented there do not really work in Dorico.

  1. You cannot just create empty staves. You can only create players for specific instruments.
  2. You cannot hide and show staves in the same way.
  3. You cannot freely move text in the same way.

    How do you start a score analysis like this in Dorico? By start I mean, how do you set up a template as it is described in the first template and how do you create the proper look for these reductions?

I can quickly give you some hope for “generic” staves:

I believe that the “generic” staves under the Sketch section of Players will serve your purpose:

Furthermore, in Engrave Mode the size of individual staves can be changed with Edit > Notations > Staff Size.

I’m afraid I don’t follow you. What kinds of text positioning have you not been able to accomplish? (Remember that in Engrave Mode things can be moved quite freely.)

I believe your use-case will also involve making a condensed score, for which I will defer to others here with greater expertise.

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I make score reductions all the time. Paste Special / Reduce is the command you want, if you don’t want to do the reduction mentally.

The catch is Dorico will introduce a different voice for each section that isn’t homorhythmic, so you need to plan your reduction logically to use a minimum amount of voices. You can’t just select the entire score and Reduce.

Not sure what you mean here, but you can hide whatever you want with Staff / Manual Staff Visibility, even staves that contain music.

With something primarily homorhythmic, it’s really fast. With just a few clicks (and some enharmonic respelling) I can go from this …

… to this:

Even something with quite a few independent voices can be reduced fairly quickly with some planning, like this:

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Thank you guys for all the great hints. Most of it got me to do Dorico what I wanted. However, there are still some things that are not clear to me.

One is regarding showing and hiding of players/instruments, I got how you show certain players per system break. But how do you manage to introduce a new system after a certain number of bars within the system? Is this also possible with the players set up or is it only doable with ossia staffs?

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Assuming you mean a new staff… use right-click>staff>add staff above (or below). Then, when you want it to disappear again, use right-click>staff>remove staff [be aware: that staff will keep any notes you have input]

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Such a great community, here! Thank you all for being really helpful. Dorico is not always straight forward when you have been a Sibelius user for years. But with your help it seems like I can find all the things I need, after all.

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I found these relevant videos especially helpful as I dove deeper into learning Dorico. I’d brew up a cuppa, fire 'em up, and pause frequently to try out the techniques discussed:

And here’s one focused on condensing staves:

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One feature I wish Dorico had was the notion of read-only staves that contain aliased notes reduced from some set of other staves. That way we could just create one of these alias staves and it would always be showing a reduction from N number of other staves, automatically, even as we change the notes on the other staves, the reduction would always reflect those changes. This would be extremely helpful for me while composing, even if the reduction is imperfect and not really intended to ever be printed out or anything like that. Just a tool to easily see the harmony and voicing that is happening between multiple staves…in order to analysis the work in progress more easily.

In the case of analyzing and existing work, i think it makes perfect sense to just copy and paste-special into a couple new staves for analyzing purposes…and again…it may or may not be a perfect print-worthy reduction, but at least all the notes will be on one staff or perhaps a grand staff, to make it easier to quickly analyze the material.

doing a proper reduction for the purpose of actually printing and using it, for example to take an orchestral work and reduce it for piano…that is never going to be an automatic process it will always require someone to really put their mind into it… paste-special would be a good starting point perhaps.

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You can always just create empty treble, bass, or grand staves in the setup page; and then make the following adjustments:

Layout Options > Staves & Systems > Staff labels > none
Layout Options > Brackets & Braces > No Brackets

And this will give you empty staves in the style you are looking for.

You could also add extra staves above, and ossia staves, whatever you want which could be useful. And then you can use manual staff visibility to hide/show them as you please.

It’s worth noting that this functionality and his examples are roughly similar to “cutaway scores,” which is not fully implemented right now but is on the development radar, something I believe the team is actively working toward improving.

Finally, for all the instrument legend labels, I would probably just use manual staff text (Shift+X). They can be treated like paragraphs in a word processor, so you can add line breaks as needed. It seems he is using quite a small font for those, so you can save this as a font style which can even be assigned to a key command to make it faster to access over and over.

Dorico’s treatment of text is indeed a bit strict and “sticky,” as it magnetizes toward notes/rests in the actual staff. You can fine-tune placement by increasing or decreasing your rhythmic grid value to give you much more flexibility. But I would agree it sometimes results in wonky placement that can be frustrating. In such cases, switch over to the Engrave tab and then you can adjust precisely. I have been advocating for the ability to hold down a modifier key for a quick “unsticky” override of such elements, without having to enter engrave mode… but alas, that’s how you can do it.

To get you started, I duplicated two measures randomly from one of the above videos:


(his version)

(my rendition in Dorico - the engraving is a bit different and it could use some work but I think it’s pretty close and for the sake of reduction and analysis, it does the job!). See attached project file to get an idea of how I’ve set some of this up (take notice of layout options etc where I made some spacing modifications and removed the staff labels etc.)

Reduction Analysis Demo.dorico (483.0 KB)

Obviously the video examples have multiple staves, so the point is you could add as many grand, bass, and treble staves as you need using that template. Hope that helps!

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