Assume I have a large percussion section with a bunch of instruments and 2 or 3 players. Assume (for example) that the marimba is played by two different players at different times. What is the best setup for this situation? If I assign a marimba to each player, Dorico will think that there are 2 marimbas. Is there a better method or does it matter? Different case, the 2 players both play the 1 marimba at the same time. (Similar to piano 4 hands) Is there a sensible way to handle this?
If you are trying to avoid automatic instrument numbering, there are methods to do this (using player groups or renaming the instruments with empty spaces at the beginning of the instrument name)
From your description of the first case/situation it is not clear to me if the two players play the same physical marimba, or each one hast its own (in the first case there will be some walking going on, on the stage). If you avoid the automatic numbering, it doesn’t make much of a difference: each player has his score, and if they play the same marimba, there will be a Part layout on the stand of that marimba.
(If you don’t want to show duplicated marimbas in the score you can use Manual Staff Visibility, or even just Hide Empty Staves.)
Sorry if my thought are confused: maybe you can show a short example of those situation in a Dorico file with what you have achieved until now, and someone will give suggestions based omn that.
Not sure what the musical material and range is, but you could use a marimba grand staff and assign the upper staff to one player, and the lower staff to the other player (possibly with some staff text as “Player 1” and “Player 2” attached to the corresponding staves).
Again: an example would be helpful in clearing what your situation is.
Some John Williams Signature editions have a similar issue of one instrument e.g. a triangle being used by two diferent players (or in the official score they appear on two different staffs labelled Percussion 1, Percussion 2 etc.
For these cases I removed the numbering. So on both 5 line percussion staffs the instrument label is triangle.
The problem with Marimbas is of course that you will get two staffs ( or two grand staffs dependent on the instrument definition) for the Marimbas if added to two players. If they just play marimba you could maybe condense them but that does not work if your percussion players, as probably the case, play several instruments.
So maybe it is best to keep one marimba as separate player and add manual labels on player change or eventually experiment with two marimbas, remove the numbering and manually condense them. It might not be easy to get just one simple marimba label for this staff however.
My trick is to use Cyrillic homoglyphs. Provided the font you use for your staff labels has a cyrillic, I don’t think there’s any instrument whose name doesn’t contain at least one of {ABCEHIKOPTXaceiopxy}.
In any case, especially with such a bulky and expensive instrument as a marimba, it would be a good idea to make explicit in the score preface that only one is needed, but it needs to be accessible by both players. That removes all potential confusion so you can then give each player their own marimba instrument in Setup.