Can you explain what it is you’re trying to do? It sounds like you’re setting up your score with a single player holding both a “voice” instrument and a tenor sax, which is a little unusual. I suspect you may really want one singer and one sax player, and you want the sax part to be transposed correctly. Is that right?
If that’s the case, then in Setup mode you should add one Voice player and one tenor sax player. You don’t need to worry about clef and transposition overrides at all; Dorico will handle the transposition for you.
When you’re viewing/entering music, note that you have a choice in the lower left corner of working in Concert Pitch or Transposed Pitch.
If you want to see the sax part transposed, you should choose Transposed Pitch.
Here’s the singer and the sax both playing a scale in concert F major, correctly transposed to G major for the sax.
What I”m trying to do is create a single part that can be played by multiple instruments that are in different keys. I would like to be able to only have to make changes to one part. As it says in the help docs under “Layouts with clef/transposition overrides“:
It is a common requirement in pieces for wind/concert bands and ensembles with flexible instrumentation to produce multiple versions of the same part, each using a different transposition, such as B♭, A, and F. This allows performers playing instruments with different transpositions to play together.
Okay, but it still sounds like you’re setting things up incorrectly. I think you want separate players, not one player with two instruments.
For example, if you wanted the tenor sax part to also be able to be played by trombone, then you would add a tenor sax player and enter all the sax music. If you view the tenor sax layout, you’ll see it correctly transposed for that instrument.
To get the trombone part, you right-click the tenor sax layout and choose Duplicate Layout. Right-click on the new layout and choose Rename, and then enter Trombone. Right click again and choose Clef and Transposition Overrides, and set things up like this:
This is what I was looking for. My confusion was adding the instruments to the player. Now I understand. The “Player” is the Part. In my case it might be “Lead” with just a concert key instrument. Then in each duplicated layout, I’m overriding the clef/key of the concert instrument.
I wasn’t understanding the that “override” belongs to the layout and not to the player/instrument.
Well, it’s really a layout that’s the part. A player is just a person sitting in front of you, holding one or more instruments (e.g., one player doubling on flute and piccolo). A layout contains the music for one or more players. For example, a full score layout has the music for all of the players; a part layout might have the music for the tenor sax player, or it might have the music for both trumpet players.
Got it. Just have to wrap my mind around that. I have one remaining, odd problem. Your example above with the tenor and trombone works fine. Is there any way that I could do something to “break” the clef change from working? I have a file where I can create transposed layouts that are working correctly but when I make a layout like your example changing the clef to bass, it doesn’t change the clef.
Ah, it’s because the Lead instrument, which I think is intended for barbershop quartet, by default uses a treble octave transposing clef, and you’ve forced a change to regular treble. Clef overrides in a layout won’t change an explicit clef.
There are a couple of things you could do here. First, in Write mode, select the treble clef at the start of the Lead staff and delete it.
Option 1 is to go to Library > Instruments, find the Lead instrument, and change its default clef to be a regular treble clef.
For Option 2, go to Setup mode, expand the player card for the Lead player, click on the three dots next to the instrument name, and choose Change Instrument. Then pick a different voice instrument – like the one that just says Voice, which uses a regular treble clef by default. After you make this change, you can change the instrument name to be Lead if you want, by double clicking the three dots again and choosing Edit Names. You will also have to select all of the music for this player and transpose it up an octave.
Wow. I’m glad I asked because I would have never figured that out. I figured a vocal would be a safe concert instrument. I guess I’ll go with flute from now on.
