For arranging music for the Chemnitzer Concertina, I need a top staff of five lines and a bottom staff of two lines. This is easy to do in Finale, but I haven’t been able to figure it out in Dorico. Does anyone know if it is possible?
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Assuming you’re using Dorico Pro, I would probably start by going to Library > Instruments and defining a new 2-line instrument based on (say) the Treble staff instrument in the Sketch category. It looks like you don’t need to show anything other than chord symbols there, so it doesn’t matter whether that instrument is pitched or unpitched, and pitched is normally a bit easier to work with, so that’s what I’d do. If you need to change the spacing between the two lines, that would be a reason to define a percussion kit with two instruments and set it to use the Grid presentation type (via the Players page of Layout Options).
Next I’d assign two instruments to the player, say a regular treble staff sketch instrument and your new 2-line instrument. In Layout Options, in the Players page, disable instrument changes, so that you always see both staves throughout.
Next I would input the music as normal. You won’t be able to make chord symbols appear by default between the two lines of the lower staff, but if you select one chord symbol and use Edit > *Select More to grow the selection, you can then move them all to the right spot.
For the other text, I would recommend using lyrics, for which you can have multiple lines both above and below the one-line staff.
If you have any big problems creating this kind of appearance, let us know.
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