Musical Theatre pit keyboard

[Beechside]

When creating parts for theatre pit players in musical theatre, Keys 1 and 2 cover multiple instruments. Regardless of what instrument is being played, everything is always presented on a grand staff.

Although I have my own working methods, I don’t think I have best practice and I wonder if anyone has tips? The simple way is to just use staff text with a border, which allows different text for right and left hands.

Playback is not essential but would be nice. However, a single player holding multiple instruments just doesn’t work well and condensing wasn’t meant for this kind of work.

So, MT composers, how do you do it?

[rraby]

Take a look at this thread, a creative solution was suggested that might suit your needs:

Instrument changes in a musical theatre context (keys part)

I am working on a musical theatre score that requires a keyboard player to produce multiple instrumental sounds, often two (or more, if layered in performance using MainStage or other software) at the same time. Ideally, I’d like the playback of the score to reflect the instrumental sounds specified in the keys part, but I have been unable to automagically combine two instruments that sound at the same time to a grand staff using Dorico’s elegant instrument changes mechanism. I am wondering if t…

[Beechside]

Terrific - thank you Roy (and, of course the always helpful @Christian_R). I’ll work with this and see if I can get my required layout but the bulk of the problem is solved.