When I search in the Dorico manual for ‘imploding music’, an explanation for how to do this does not appear. I’m certain it’s possible though…
…to select multiple staves and have Dorico merge all of those (e.g. monophonic) lines, into a single stave, e.g. to (begin) to turn a sax quartet piece into a piano piece.
Is this possible?
One found workaround is to copy the monophonic likes one by one, go into write mode, select ‘chord’ and then paste.
Try paste special>reduce? (after all, you are producing a piano reduction!)
Yep, Paste Special/Reduce is the way to go. Assuming there is quite a bit of counterpoint (it’s a quartet), you might want to reduce any homorhythmic parts separately, that way Dorico will have them share a stem. If you select a whole system for example and then reduce it, Dorico will use as many voices as required for that system, even if there are bars where notes could share a stem. You’ll likely have quite a few enharmonics to flip too going from saxes to piano, but it’s not too much work.
Is it your piece? A published piece? I do a lot of saxophone writing so I’m always curious to hear what others are doing.
Thanks Janus. Thanks FredGUnn. - Not a piece, just an imaginary example.
If you can think of other ways of phrasing your question when searching the manual, you might end up in the right place – e.g. searching “merge lines” (a phrase you used in the body of your post) brings up the relevant page as the 2nd result, in the latest manual anyway.
Finale calls this “Implode Music” so it could be useful for new converts to have that term come up in the documentation if it currently doesn’t.
Thanks Lillie, I had tried different phrasings but not ‘merge’.
Thesaurus to the rescue.