Has anyone encountered the problem that when one instrument has an added staff at one point in a flow, Dorico will display all the instruments all the time for that player in the score AND part layouts for that whole flow even when instrument changes are enabled ?!
I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong (can’t imagine what) or if there’s a bug of some kind. The example: I have a player with soprano and a tenor saxophone instruments in a piece. In one particular flow, about half way through the flow, I add a staff for only a few bars in the tenor. This causes Dorico to insist on displaying the tenor and soprano staves in the score and part layouts for the entire flow, even though instrument changes are enabled and working perfectly in all the other flows in which staves are not added.
Same problem in the Trumpet part (which doubles Santur in this work). And in the score, in this flow, it is showing both instruments on both players, even though it’s properly doing instrument changes in every other flow.
My solution for now is to use two voices on the same staff, because I need to turn these parts in ASAP, which is acceptable for now, like this:
Unfortunately adding extra staves to an instrument prevents that instrument from “participating” in instrument changes.
You could try to find another way of notating this, perhaps by using another instrument held by the same players for these split out sections? I would suggest using divisi but of course, if a player can divide, it can’t double
I see. Thanks @Lillie_Harris. Just curious — is that because of a technical reason in the program, that could theoretically be sorted out in the future? Or is that a choice on the part of the developers? I am realizing that I have actually encountered this problem several times before and am only understanding why now. It really seems like something that should be be possible, i.e. adding a staff in an instrument participating in instrument changes.
The beauty of software is that with sufficient time (i.e. money) and willingness, more or less anything can be achieved – but we always have to make pragmatic decisions about how to spend the limited development time we have available to us, because there is an opportunity cost associated with everything we do (i.e. for everything we choose to do, we are also choosing not to do every other thing that we could do with that time).
That means that when we get really gnarly challenges that only affect a small number of situations, we have to think very hard about whether we should push through to solve something now, or defer it until later.
All of which is a very long way of saying that ideally we would like to allow this, but we haven’t chosen to prioritise it as yet. It’s something that we may well return to in future, but I can’t say when.
