Multiple instruments / same staff position

Dorico
1

During note-entry, is there a way to toggle between two percussion-kit instruments assigned to the same line-or-space staff position?

For example, one might define a percussion kit that assigns, I dunno, both a kick drum and a floor tom to the center line of a five-line staff. When entering a note onto that line, how would one tell Dorico which instrument should be played by that note?

I haven’t been able to find documentation or forum postings that are exactly on-point, but I swear that I’ve been able to do this in the past, if only by accidentally hitting some key combination.

2

In the Preferences, you can set how you want to input your percussion — (by memory) either following the position on the staff (not useful here) or following the percussion map (this one should work for you).
Hope it helps!

3

IIRC one can also use ALT/OPT + up/down-arrow keys to move from one value to another on a line in the kit.

4

@Derrek

I’d already tried Alt-arrow, which I seem to have recalled being the keystroke combnation I needed. But it wasn’t working & I couldn’t find anything in the manual confirming that I was using the correct keystrokes.

But after reading your confirmation that Alt-arrow is the correct combo, I re-created the entire percussion kit from scratch, and tried again. This time it worked. I belive that the two player kits were identical, so I’m baffled.

Bottom line is that I now have a percussion part that works the way it’s supposed to, even if I have no idea why the first version did not. Operator error, most likely, but who knows?

Your quick response was very helpful, thanks.

C

5

Hopefully this page is helpful for when you’re currently inputting notes:

And this one for when you’ve input the notes, and want to move them around later:

6

Thank you, Lillie!

I’m still struggling a bit with the way that working with percussion instruments differs from defining, and then entering and editing data, for other types of instruments.

E.g., some of my percussion kits contain a subset of instruments that make no sound, even when all the correct VSTs endpoints are included in the Playback Template. Other instruments in the same kit work fine. Dorico support has been working on this problem, but we don’t yet have a solution. So knowing exactly where to look for further information is very helpful.

1 Like