Multiple Instruments = One Staff?

No. Whichever route you take is going to feel a little workaroundy, given there isn’t specific functionality for your scenario.

Condensing in Dorico basically works the other way round - you tell it what each player should play, then it constructs a single condensed stave in the score - but I fear five players is probably to much for a single condensed staff to work effectively.

I think there are two viable methods:

  1. The dumb method: use six separate players, and a scratch score layout that shows all of them. Copy and paste to your heart’s content (and note the very useful Edit > Paste Special > Duplicate to Stave Above/Below functions, which you should assign keyboard shortcuts to). The disadvantage to this method is that if things change or you make mistakes, you’ll need to correct in multiple staves, but not multiple layouts - this is the purpose of a scratch score that no-one ever sees.
  2. Cues: Still use six players and a scratch score, but only put each set of notes into one staff. Then use Cues to cue from the source staff to the destination staves. Cues, again, can be copied and pasted, duplicated to stave above/below etc., and because they’re dynamic, they’ll always be right. And if you’re not using cues elsewhere in the project, you can set them up in such a way that they include everything and are scaled to full size etc. The advantage to this method is that you only ever need to correct stuff in one place; the disadvantage is that you’ll have to fiddle with cue labels.

Incidentally, your topic seems to have nothing in common with the content of the rest of this thread, not to mention the fact that the rest of this thread is nearly five years out of date. I’m scratching my head as to why you bumped this particular thread…

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