At first, I thought Dorico’s idea of “one player with multiple instruments” with the automatic instrument change is pretty neat.
However, in practice, it’s very hard to work with.
In full score (if you don’t have hide empty staves) or in gallery view, you can see a separate staff in the system for each of these instruments. Even though it doesn’t make any sense because you would never see them play together (Presumably?). This makes arranging / composing or every transcribing very difficult because of potentially much more staves that are actually in your music.
Even if my instrument was the same for an entire flow - there is no way to hide specific instruments from flows without hiding the entire player.
I imagine a better way to work with this is to always see one staff and one instrument, and manually insert instrument changes. This also makes the composer / arranger more aware of these decisions, as they can make sure to not write music for the two instrument in the same time, and provide ample time to change them.
Given that annoyance I just sometimes not just this feature, and use other workarounds to achieve what I need. For example - I can put those on different players so I can more easily assign / remove them from flows. If I don’t switch mid flow I can work with that, but if I do then I need to reorganize the players after the fact. Either way - not ideal.
Is there a workflow / settings that already exists and I missed that can make using this (much needed) feature?
Yes. Work in Galley view. There, both (all) instrument staves will be shown. Just add notes for the required instrument and Page view will automatically reflect the instrument changes.
Galley view is the musical information (flow) all spread out, independent of any formatting for printing on paper (layout). This is why paper size is a property of layout rather than the project or flow. When you’re in page view, you’re looking at a particular layout that formats the information from the flow(s) for a particular combination of paper, player(s), flow(s), and layout settings.
In Page view, you don’t need to have “Hide empty staves” enabled to get rid of the extra instrument stave(s); you need to have “Allow instrument changes” enabled.
You’re right that all of the instrument staves show in Galley view, but that’s what it’s designed for – as @sjanssens says, it shows you all of the musical information.
One thing you might play with is instrument filters in Galley view. I just finished engraving a piece where flute doubles piccolo just for a few bars, and like you, I didn’t want to have that piccolo staff sitting there empty the whole time. So I set up a filter that hid that staff, and then I turned the filter off only when I was entering the piccolo part. (Instrument filters are great for lots of other scenarios as well.)
A lot of this comes down to personal taste and workflow; no piece of software is going to perfectly match every user’s preferences.
The entire point of this is that this is very uncomfortable because you are forced to see all instrument staffs always. For arrangers / composers it just makes life harder.
I think players information is not a layout thing but a music thing? It informs musical choices like “I can’t have the clarinet and flute play at the same time because I only have one player to play them!” in a way that page size and other layout info doesn’t.
Yeah that’s one of the workarounds I tried, but in a lot of cases it annoyingly requires you change filters a lot between flows / parts.
I disagree. I actually really like Dorico’s approach of “music on paper” being a separate problem than “music information”.
I think this particular instance though is not a music on paper thing, but rather a “playing direction”. If I didn’t care about playback (or other instruments settings), I would just use the same staff and add labels for changing instruments manually. In some case it really is the same instrument physically (imagine keys switching sound patches).
I think it makes perfect sense for a composer / arranger to have one staff for these instances. At the very least I would like to be able to select assign instruments to flows PER INSTRUMENT and not just per player.
Even if there are cases where the same musician plays two different instruments at the same time, I think it makes sense to have a “collapse view” when writing the same way to can write while in condensed view (I know there are limitations in this case but still)
If you don’t want to work in Galley view all the time for whatever reason, you can always just add the first note or whatever in that view and then switch views back.
The advantage of having the various instrument parts split is sometimes the ensemble may change - it may be a slightly different orchestra, where a different percussion player is the person who usually plays a specific percussion instrument (ex. Fred over there always plays the marimba), or a different woodwind player is the doubler, and you may need to be able to move an existing instrument part to a different player but keep all the notes there.
I had to do this before with an orchestral piece that was performed by a few slightly different orchestras, nearly a decade ago when I used Sibelius. It required a lot of care to make these adjustments without creating problems. It would have been a much easier process if I could just freely move the instruments around to different players and have the music automatically update like in Dorico - many hours of work could have been done in a few minutes.
Note that if it is more comfortable for you to write for single instrument players, nothing stops you from doing just that. At the end of writing, you can refine your engraving by dragging-and-dropping the appropriate instruments into the appropriate players in Setup mode.
I too would like to have a different view option here. I work in Galley View until I’m ready for layout work, but I find it can be unwieldy with even a small number of doubles. Using filters is not always practical because a) it requires a lot of turning them on and off in various combinations, b) while it hides staff visibility it does not actually turn those staves off (i.e. exploding music across staves will copy into hidden staves.)
I would love a third view option in which only one “active” staff is shown for each player. I could imagine each staff having a “track header” similar to what one might find in Logic with selection buttons for each instrument the player holds. Selecting that button would show the active instrument. In order to avoid confusion, some kind of color coded highlighting on the staff could indicate that notes have been placed in another instrument when that instrument is hidden, much like what you see when placing a chord symbol region.
I’ve lately been in the habit of avoiding trumpet/flugel doubling staves to save real estate. This works just fine, but a similar approach is not possible with woodwinds that double at different transpositions.
This approach would certainly make my life so much easier, especially when working with jazz orchestra scores where every woodwind player and trumpet player typically might have one or more doubles.
One tip that might help: in Page View, you can you “Move to Staff Above/Below” (Alt N/M) – and that will move notes to other instruments held by the Player, thus creating an instrument change on a single staff.
One of the important improvements in D6: now, when you use a filter, only the visible staves are active (i.e. exploding or multi-staves note entry ignore the hidden staves, which is great!)
Of all opinions and proposed workflows in this thread, this point is the one I completely don’t understand: If I find myself in a scenario where I turn filters on and off the whole time, it means that I’m actually working with all the instrument a player holds. So, in this very case, would it not actually be better to see one stave per instrument all the time, so it’s easy to move things around and put my content into the right places?
I mean, I totally understand that when a player holds 5 instruments and I only need 2 of them for, say, a flow I’m working on, than the other 3 are in the way. But that’s exactly what instrument filters are for. And when I’working with all the 5 instruments of a player, I actually want to see all 5 staves.
Please parden my ignorance, but I really don’t get this point. (And I’ve recently worked on a jazz opera for a composer who had 3-10 instruments per player, so I guess I know what you’re talking about…)
Wow, I hadn’t gotten there yet, but that IS great news!
I’ll do my best to try to describe a situation. Imagine a wind section that has 5 saxophones: alto 1 doubling soprano and flute; alto 2 doubles flute and clarinet; tenor 1 doubles clarinet; tenor 2 doubles clarinet; baritone doubles bass clarinet. The 4 trumpets also double flugels. Now, Imagine the various possible combinations of these instruments. For example, I might have alto 1 on flute, and four trumpets on flugels. Then I might have alto 1 on flute, but only 3 trumpets on flugels. I need a different filter for each of these, right. Now imagine all of the possible combinations of one set of instruments with the others. I’m a little rusty on my math with factorials and twos-to-the-powers-of to figure it out right now, but that’s a lot of possibilities. I need a filter for each of these combinations if I want to avoid having multiple empty staves viewed at once. It really is not practical.
For me, it would be so much simpler if I could simply choose which ONE staff I want to view from any single player at any given time, at least at certain stages of the notation process. I recognize that others might not see the value in this, but I think at least a few of us might benefit from such a thing.
And I am totally open if I am missing something about the UI that would allow filters to be used in this kind of situation more efficiently. Let me know!
You may be aware of this, but if you’re viewing all staves, you can Cmd/Ctrl+click items in the staves you want to see** and then click the + icon in the filter overlay. This will immediately filter down to the selected staves. And if this is a combination you’ve used before, Dorico is smart enough not to create a duplicate filter.
So instead of having to create 1152 filters and then dig through the list to find the right one, you can just select the staves you want at a given point and filter on them.
** Or any other way of selecting material on multiple staves. So you could click the top staff, Shift+click the bottom staff, and then Ctrl+click to remove from the selection any staves without notes. Or use a marquee selection to select a group of consecutive staves.