Hey all! It would be great if custom instruments and kits were available in your project when assigning instruments to players (the “Instrument Picker”) and not just in the “Edit Instruments” dialogue (called “Instruments…” in the jump bar).
I’ve noticed some strange behavior when it comes to creating and naming kits. I’ve created a “Custom West African Percussion” kit for use in my project by adding a new player and selecting “Create Empty Kit” when prompted. The “Name in instrument picker:” for the kit in the “Edit Instruments” dialogue is automatically created as “Percussion (1 line kit) (in score)” which is fine, but required a bit of searching to find before I manually changed the name to match what I entered into Staff Labels (“Custom West African Percussion”). I think it would be beneficial for the name in the instrument picker to automatically match the first “staff labels” name given when created.
Additionally, I can’t select this kit again if I want another player to use the same kit without manually exporting the kit as a library file and then reimporting it. I’ve noticed some built-in kits (such as “Drum Set (Basic)” are available in the “instrument picker,” but custom kits aren’t viewable in the instrument picker. Even though they’ve been given a name in the “Name in instrument picker” field of the “Edit Instruments” dialogue, they’re only viewable in that dialogue, and not when assignment instruments to new players.
I know it’s been said before, but being able to remove numbering from certain instruments would be a huge boon in this situation. I have one custom kit that is shared between several percussionists and I’d like it not to be re-numbered when the staff name appears, chiefly because those automatically-generated instruments numbers don’t always correspond to the actual Player number. Because there are more than two players sharing the kit, I can’t use the Section/Single player gimmick to eliminate numbers, nor do I want to use the spacebar gimmick unless absolutely necessary.
I’ve also noticed a couple of inconsistencies and some weird behavior. For example, my custom kit appears twice in “Edit Instruments,” and I’m not sure which one is associated with the instrument my player is holding. Clarification would be very helpful!
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Custom instruments are quite new in Dorico, and they are somewhat still second class citizens in the ecosystem. They are already very powerful but there are a few missing pieces to the equation, and I am sure the team will get to it at some point. Last I heard they were still figuring out the best way to take advantage of them in the long run… which is a sound way to look at things imho.
Concerning kits, one big drawback is the fact that a Playback Template can only contain one “drum set” with preclude the possibility to have your different drum set kits ready to import.
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Welcome to the forum, @BenjaminRoberts.
You can make your custom percussion kit available in the instrument picker by clicking the star icon in Library > Instruments when selecting your custom kit. It will then appear in the picker for future projects.
If you’re working on a project that uses your custom kit, it’s expected that you will see the kit listed twice in Library > Instruments: one corresponds to the one held by the player in your project (and is appended with (in score) in the list), while the other one is the version in the project library.
Thanks for the quick response, @dspreadbury !
Unfortunately, I’m still having issues, which I think may be bugs. Custom percussion kits, and in a few cases, custom percussion instruments, are appearing in the “Edit Instruments” list unpredictably and inconsistently. Sometimes, they are doubled, or tripled, with inconsistent naming:
For example, I created a new unpitched percussion instrument called “Kenken,” based on the Agogo (High) default instrument, and clicked the Star icon. I added this instrument to a kit, then deleted the kit from my score (but not from “edit instruments”), and now the instrument appears listed three times (appended Kenken (1), Kenken (2), and Kenken (3)) in the “Edit Instruments List,” however, it doesn’t appear in the Instrument Picker at all. I also can’t add it to a new kit, even if I try to create an empty kit and enter it through there.
I experienced a similar issue copying default Congas and creating new African percussion instruments based on them: Dunun (Dununba), (Sangban), and (Kenkeni) replacing Conga (Super Tumba), (Tumba), and (Quinto) respectively. My custom Dununba appears three times in the “Edit Instruments” dialogue, without being appended numerically.
Here is an example of the missing instrument in the Instrument Picker. As you can see in the screenshot, it is starred in Library > Instruments
I did. a little more digging, and it looks like I was able to solve part of the problem.
I’m not sure why, but several of the new instruments I made did not have families assigned to them. After manually assigning them to the “unpitched percussion” family, they appeared in the instrument picker. Are new instruments designed to be created without retaining the family of their parent instrument? I’m not sure I understand the utility of this.
I still am unable to identify what’s been causing the doubling and, in some instances, tripling of new instruments in Library > Instruments
If you do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and attach the resulting zip file here, that will include the userlibrary.xml file in which instruments you’ve saved as defaults are saved. Hopefully I will then find that when I install your user library, I see your custom instruments in duplicate or triplicate as well, at which point I can tell you what’s going on.
Hi, Daniel. I ended up deleting my custom instruments, recreating them, then creating a new file and copying my music over, and the duplicating and tripling of instruments no longer seems to be an issue.
Thank you for your attention to this. I’d like to thank you and your team for everything you’ve done for music notation software. As a long time Finale user, this transition has been difficult, but the general ethos behind Dorico (and this forum!) are extremely encouraging. I really appreciate the way Dorico works on a fundamental level. I can’t wait to dig deeper.
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