I’m having a hard time articulating good search criteria for this point, so here’s my struggle…
Is there a good way to really customize score order and disconnect certain players or staves from the imposed instrument/section groupings? For example, I am writing a cue in which my principal double bass moves to the rhythm section to play upright, but when I add “Upright Bass” or any variant and move that staff on the page to group it with my rhythm section Dorico messes with my time signature grouping and seems to keep it tied to the “string section.” I just want this to be a stand alone player nested in the rhythm section (and ideally sharing a brace with the guitar).
Thoughts?
Here’s my score BEFORE moving “Upright Bass” up to the rhythm section, this is how I’d like my time signatures to appear:
Here it is AFTER moving… Dorico repositions my time code marker “above the strings,” or in this case, the highest “string section staff” which I want to modify, and the time signatures are converted to single staff variants.
UPDATE: I did manage a quick fix, which was to go to Library>Instruments and change the “Instrument Family” from “Strings” to “Sketch.” This seems to make the staff totally independent, but is there a better way?
One could use two Players, each one associated with its desired fellow instruments but both Players sharing a layout. By hiding the staff of the instrument not playing, you should be able to have the instrument switch location in the score and yet provide a unified score to the person playing the part.
Yes good tip regarding the part, though for this cue the “upright bass” will be a standalone part and not switch between section bassi and solo playing. The issue I’m really trying to resolve is in the score I don’t want this instrument to embed itself in the “strings” family, since that triggers all kinds of other formatting issues when I move it up or down (the time signature positioning, the braces and brackets, the position of the marker staff, etc.).
I think my jury rig fix of assigning this instrument to the “Sketch” family is working for now, but definitely curious how folks are handling totally custom score order and layout. One thing I did like about Finale (and as I get deeper and deeper into Dorico, there aren’t many, ha!), was that I could lay out my score from scratch however I wanted to and draw all my own braces and manually place my time sigs and so forth. Dorico is 99.9% efficient, but once in a while I trip over something like this that sort of locks me up.
