I use percussion kits to notate multiple percussion parts in a compact, readable way. One of my kits is a two-line grid with crash cymbal and ratchet. The intention isn’t for these two instruments to be played by the same person simultaneously, it just makes for a nice “Percussion II” part. I’d like the ratchet player to switch to triangle midway through the piece. For any single instrument adding an instrument change is simple; but in this percussion kit, instead of labelling the crash cymbal as “Crash Cymbal,” Dorico automatically gives me a Crash Cymbal I and II, and instead of labelling the change as “to triangle” next to the ratchet/triangle line, it labels the entire staff as “to perc.” I can’t find any workaround for these issues.
Is there any way I can remove the numbering from the crash cymbal line and make the instrument change correctly show “to triangle?”
I don’t think there’s a way of solving both of these problems simply. I guess you’re switching to another kit that contains a crash symbol and a triangle, which is why Dorico ends up numbering the two crash cymbals independently. You can prevent Dorico from showing a number on them by editing the name of one of them to be slightly different, e.g. you could add a leading space to the name for the one in the second kit, so that it is actually " Crash Cymbal" (note the additional space after the first quotation mark).
For the instrument change label, you can at least override this via Properties.
I never thought of the leading space in the instrument name idea – that’s clever! And yes, using custom text and moving the label in the properties panel is fine for something as short and simple as this. Thanks for the help!
Your part has 2 lines and 3 spaces. In Percussion- land that means 5 total instruments. As long as you don’t keep switching them—and you’d better not—I don’t see why you can’t just assign different instruments to each and use abbreviations (as you did) for each of them.
