Say I have an Oboeplayer switching between Oboe and English Horn. Can I still see this as just ONE staff in galley view?
Having two staves for seems to be counterintuitive since it still is just one player, and also eats up space for no reason and makes the score less ledgible.
Thanks!
No, in galley view you will always see the staves for all instruments separately.
That is also how you can create instrument changes: input the oboe notes on the Oboe staff, then the cor anglais notes on the Cor Anglais staff, and let Dorico squish them onto one staff in page view (as long as their notes don’t overlap).
In galley view, if you want to reduce the number of staves you’re seeing temporarily, you can use an instrument filter.
Thanks @Lillie_Harris for the quick answer.
What is the advantage of seeing two staves? By definition, one is always empty and just makes the score less ledgible (And with players doubling on more instruments, you have three or more staves then?)
The advantage is that you can add notes to the right instrument and achieve instrument changes in page view. If the staves collapsed in galley view as well as page view, it would be very hard (once an instrument change has been established) to re-access the non-active instrument later on in the flow.
As I said, you can use instrument filters to control which instruments you’re seeing at any given moment. Or switch back to page view, perhaps in a dummy, working layout with outrageous page dimensions.
Stefan, I guess Galley View also shows us the structure of how Dorico handles things. That way Galley View is more than just a panoramic display of Page View.
Please reconsider this philosophy - or at least allow the option for us to have a different one than you do. There is no reason for a big band composer to have to sift through as many as 15 staves to see what their five-person reeds section is playing in their jazz scores by default, and they shouldn’t be forced to spend several minutes in the instrument filters dialogue over the course of a composition project to avoid the bloat.
Dorico seems to view that composers write for players and not for instruments. Why does galley view suddenly insist on having us write for instruments and not for players?
Thanks,
Brian
Thanks for your feedback, Brian. We’re unlikely to change the way this works in the near future. Galley view provides the primary way of writing for multiple instruments held by the same player, so it’s important that all the instruments held by a player appear in this view. However, I know that this comes at a cost when you have players holding more than a couple of instruments. It’s not obvious to me how to square this particular circle, but I am keeping an open mind about how we might be able to change this in future.
An alternative for now is also to have a “working layout”, to which you can flexibly assign and remove players depending on whose music you want to work on. Or, have a variety of working layouts for different subsets of your players, which you can quickly scroll through using the layout switching key commands.
You would only need to be conscious of any local properties you set with the scope set to Locally.
As I understand, filters can be created in Galley view, to show for instance only string players , or woodwinds, or …
Maybe it would be possible to create a dynamic filter to show only instruments currently held by players?
All instruments have to be held by a player, so do you mean that you’d like the ability to filter by player, rather than by instrument?
I was probably just having a silly idea it might be possible to not only filter on a static pre-defined set of instruments, but to have a dynamic filter which shows only the instruments which are active for the players…
In a sense, that would be filter by player, but only showing the instruments the players are currently (as in: in the bars showed) using…
This is exactly what I’d love to see implemented - a galley view that only shows the players, not each individual instrument that might exist in a project.
I’m not a programmer so I’m not sure what would go into making this happen, but I do know that Finale was able to do something similar by utilizing its “change instrument” tool, so there is precedent for this within notation software. Each staff was left alone in scroll view (although we needed to manually insert our instrument switches, which is a very nice QOL improvement in Dorico). I actually do want a “panoramic display of page view” like k_b mentioned above. That kind of display is very intuitive to me, my workflow, and how I conceive new music. Seeing twice or thrice the number of staves as I have parts is very disorienting. Right now I’m utilizing the filter, but it feels like a clumsy solution to a clumsier problem.
I’m starting to get used to the software and am finding myself thinking “this is easier in Dorico than it was in Finale” more often than I used to. I even needed to revisit an old Finale project recently and had the thought “This would be easier to fix in Dorico,” so I’m definitely slowly getting won over.
I don’t wish for Dorico to simply recreate Finale, but here are a few things that Finale did well and I think it’s worth considering lifting some more ideas like Steinberg has already done with the ability to edit the behavior of the shadow note to closely replicate Speedy Entry. That was a very nice gesture to your new userbase. There are a few more concepts that if implemented would make us new customers feel more at home. This is one of those concepts.
Thank you again,
Brian
You can do this in Dorico by modifying a layout’s page dimensions to be very wide. This allows you to see music “in page view”, but on a page that looks an awful lot like galley view.
Dorico handles instrument changes differently, and therefore galley view is necessary for adding notes to the secondary instruments held by a player.