I’m having an issue where I’ve got a player holding vibraphone and a percussion kit with just bass drum, but when it switches from the drum back to vibes in this particular spot, it seems to be leaving out a few rests (there should be an eighth and quarter rest there). Also, the staff lines are colliding with the note and I don’t see a way to shorten them—I’d rather not move everything over with horizontal spacing.
It appears that the missing rests are because the vibraphone part has a half rest at the beginning of the measure, but of course that doesn’t show when the bass drum has a downbeat. If I place forced position rests in the vibraphone part I can make the rests appear, but it still doesn’t fix the spacing/collision problem.
Is there a way to manually decide where exactly the instrument change happens? I’d ideally like the instrument change to just be on the next big beat (starting on the second half note of the measure) for simplicity’s sake.
There is no way (yet) to alter the placement of the crossover from one of a player’s instruments to another. You might see if expressing the bass drum on a five-line grid (kit) helps at all. Switching from an unpitched to a pitched instrument does present some difficulties.
Instrument changes work best if they occur at barlines. If you have a transition that needs to happen within the space of a single bar, then you should switch to galley view and ensure that you have explicit rests (created by switching on Force Duration, i.e. shortcut O) on the staff belonging to the instrument that you are switching to in the same positions as the rests on the instrument you are switching from. For example, if your from-instrument ends after an eighth note at the start of the bar and shows an eighth rest followed by a quarter rest, then you need to create identical rests on the to-instrument, i.e. two explicit eighth rests followed by an explicit quarter rest. When you switch back to page view, you’ll find that the missing rests are no longer missing, because Dorico’s now showing the rests from the to-instrument.
