Making an opera score in Dorico

I’ve made a little video showing my process for making opera scores in Dorico, which may or may not be useful to anyone.
Includes making table of contents, dealing with Flow headings and Page Templates, and a few other tricks.

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Marvelous and very practical. Thanks for posting.

Thank you for this, @benwiggy. What is the text font you’re using?

It’s various styles of Kepler.

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Thanks, Ben. Very helpful even if I’m not working on an opera!

**Leigh

This is exactly the kind of thing that should go on Scorio. Thanks, Ben. Any chance you could narrate it?

The project files are not public, I’m afraid. What is it you want me to narrate, that I didn’t say in the video? :confused:

The video would be useful on Scorio in its educational role, not the project file. Oddly, my playback did not have audio. Edit: audio user error.

Not to be a party pooper, but I haven’t yet decided whether I want to open up Scorico to embedded videos and tutorials and such. Maybe…?

Perhaps you could reduce your hosting burden by simply providing a list of links to videos and tutorials.

I was thinking less about hosting (since they’re all embedded) and more about the extra work and potential complexity of the site. And it’s another layer of quality control, as I’ll have to be deciding which tutorials and videos are valuable enough to share, and which aren’t.

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I felt very validated watching this because this is EXACTLY what I do with opera and oratorio (recit player included). There is however one exception: I don’t insert pages with a template attached. I prefer simply changing the first page to a title, TOC etc … template so that there is no red override. Sometimes I have to change to first page of music back to the “First” template, depending on options. The reason I do this, especially for parts, is that if I change my mind on anything regarding those intro pages, I can do it on the template rather than on the layout itself, then everything updates everywhere - without showing overrides. It saves a lot of time.

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Thanks, Claude.

I think when I did the first one, I’d already done everything before I added the Contents page, and if you add the “prelim” pages by applying the template to the page, rather than adding pages, then anything you’ve done doesn’t move up.

Yes, you’re right that you need to sort out the Contents template itself if you’re going to add it to all the Parts.

I dare say it might be easier now with Project Templates to get everything sorted out before you start. (Useful project Templates would be something I’d like to see on @dan_kreider 's Saniflo website.)

Ahem. What’s MuseScore.com Non-Official Sheet Music Downloads got in common with a broken Saniflo? They’re both full of…

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This website will be no toy-let me tell you…

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Thanks for that @benwiggy, very helpful.

Just to say that the score I was working on in that video, Lotti’s Costantino, is now finished and available to download.

Most of last week was spent on the prelims.

https://www.ancientgroove.co.uk/lotti/lottiopera.html

That’s all seven of Lotti’s complete surviving operas done.

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Nice, Ben! Also pretty much how I do it. Still using separate flags for the vocal parts, though? :wink:

Just for the recits; the arias are beamed properly. It seemed a reasonable compromise, satisfying and annoying all parties equally.

Well said! :joy: