Running into a couple layout issues in a percussion part I am writing. I want to force Dorico to show both staves (which are different instruments) at all times. It will only do this if I force it by placing notes in both instruments at the same time.
Doing manual staff visibility and saying “show” doesn’t do anything. Is there a way to force a stave to be shown at all times?
I also need help with the name of the player/instruments. As you can see on the left, I can’t get the name centred on the bracket. Is there a way to name the bracket and not one of the staves itself?
Yes, either disable instrument changes in this percussion layout entirely, or – if you sometimes do want instrument changes but want to control them in specific systems – add a notation that prevents an instrument change taking place but doesn’t affect the music.
For example, chord symbol regions prevent instrument changes, but if you either have no chord symbols in the flow or the player(s) involved aren’t set to show chord symbols, there will be no effect on the printed music.
If you’ve renamed this instrument manually, have you accidentally left in a line break? They can be a bit tricky to detect, admittedly, when the staff label paragraph style is right-aligned (as it is by default) and therefore the cursor in the Edit Instrument Names dialog is flush against the edge of the text editing area!
Put the cursor at the right end of the name that you want to display in staff labels, then press Delete several times to clear any potential offending line breaks (apologies for teaching grandma to suck eggs; just for completeness! also hello )
So I have renamed in manually and done some crazy things with spacing and line breaks but that is because I want to name the bracket and not the individual lines. E.g. I want it to look like this:
This one works because it is a piano stave. For the top line I have created my own percussion combination of staves (which is not its own instrument entirely because I want the top stave to have four lines and the bottom five) but I want to name the bracket “George” instead of one of the instruments. Instead you see here I’ve named the top instrument “George” and then inserted a bunch of spaces to try and get the name in the right place…probably there is a better way?
(Great duo, deserving of the best notation, absolutely)
What a delightfully tricky example I’ve had a go at an alternative project, with limited time admittedly, but hopefully it might at least be partly helpful.
For Siwan’s staves, an alternative that is perhaps neater is to use a section player, rather than a single player, meaning you can use divisi: resulting in a centered instrument name, with section names aligned with each staff. That works well here, I think.
For George – that’s trickier, because the grouped staves need to have different numbers of staff lines. Divisi won’t work here, alas.
This example isn’t yet perfect, but it’s perhaps closer? I used the Edit Instruments dialog to create a variant of say a “Bassoon” (could be any instrument), made sure it matches the original in all ways except for its number of staff lines (set to 3) and clef (set to Percussion - Rectangular).
Then, I gave a single player both a standard bassoon and the 3-line bassoon. This allows the instrument names to be grouped between the staves (Library > Engraving Options > Staff Labels); however, you get the instruments automatically numbered 1/2 against the corresponding staves. I don’t think that’s possible to hide, without losing the shared, consolidated instrument name. So those would have to be removed or covered up externally. That may or may not be easier to work with than your solution (depending on how often the two staves’ distance changes dramatically?) but it’s something.
You can then add clefs, braces etc as needed manually. For playback, you can manually route staves/voices to the right sounds as well.
I am having issue too where the Staves won’t separate and i have to put notes in every bar of my aleatoric region (which is the entire movement) for it to work. is there a better way to handle this because I did the layout option thing and it ignores it completely.
In the example, I wanted to have three staves in the percussion part the bottom being the actual percussion and the other top staves become cues. Dorico suggests if I want pitch material in percussion as a cue i need to add a separate staff to the percussion as a pitch instrument. So what will happen is the pitch and unpitched will switch interchangably depending on what is in the staff and in the settings i will have to turn this off to have all the staves show up separately.
In this example, I am expecting the bottom percussion staff to show as I have for the entire movement an aleatoric line but because it does not registering the line as an item (or note for that matter) the staff disappears and is replaced by the pitched staves. And the settings in the Layout option to turn this off has no effect.
How many players are these instruments assigned to? If you currently have them all assigned to one player, you might consider making e.g. the aleatoric staff which should appear throughout the whole flow an independent player: you can still assign that player along with the original percussion player to the same part layout, and of course they can sit alongside each other in the full score as well.
Hi everyone,
I have a challenge with layout and percussion instrument.
Using a Gran Cassa from VSL Studio, I created a Play tech. to trigger a long roll.
The issue is that when scoring it, using the 3 stroke repetition on the stem, it also triggers the tremolo on the instrument, making it sound very “dirty” sound, vs the sampled roll sound the sampler has.
I tried to duplicate note and then visually assign the roll on stems with suppressed playback, leaving the other note with active playback do it’ll trigger the play tech for the roll from VSL Gran Cassa.
This is not working visually as you can see in the screen shot attached
As you can see, the first unhidden note is to the right of the stem, instead of the left. Things get worse when I tie them together.
Anyone had this issue and know how to solve?
OK, got it.
I have a few roll samples for the Gran Casta VSL library I use. I want to use them, vs the roll that dorico produces.
I created the Play tech to trigger these samples. which work well. The The three stroke symbol on the stem doesn’t do that job.
After I assign the Play tech., I hide them so only the three stroke stem notes are visible.
Does this answer your question?
In other words, I don’t know yet, another way of triggering the samples. I’m using a long & short roll right now.
If you don’t have an Expression Map that includes Tremolo then Dorico will play the tremolo as a triple(?) hit, as you are experiencing, rather than a sampled roll.
All you should need to do is add the Tremolo Playback Technique to your Expression Map, along with the appropriate Key Switch or CC information, and the tremolo notation will trigger those samples…
So I hear you saying I need to create an EM for the instrument, aside from the PM I already have, and need to change the playback tech in the PM from roll to tremolo. It also means I need more than one tremolo because I have more than one roll samples.
Is this correct?
I created an EM for the bass drum. Put a base type for Natural, then I added an add-on with tremolo. This seems to be working now, when the notes have the 3 stroke single note symbol on the stem, along with my play tech. symbol. If I don’t have the play tech symbol, it just seems to do a machine gun tremolo.
I also created a tremolo 2 for the short roll the instrument has. Did the same for it, in the EM, but it’s not working.
Any ideas?
)
