It is with my gratitude that I offer the community a very professional marching band template for Dorico. This template works for Dorico v6 and onward. I did notice that another individual shared their own marching band template. I did look at theirs, but I found a lot of errors.
Some fonts were not correct, the rastral and spacing sizes were not correct, and much, much more. My version is almost a 1:1 copy of Hal Leonard’s marching band pieces. With the help from very wonderful users on this very helpful forum, that have answered all of my questions within the past few days, I was able to create this incredible template for the community to enjoy!
When you visit my Google Drive link, you will notice that there is a readme file. Please read that file. It is very crucial that you do! It has directions you will need to follow in order to fully use the template to its best ability.
I hope you enjoy this free marching band template! I hope you can compose and or arrange professional looking pieces. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reply to this discussion topic!
Interesting! Thanks for letting me know about this! Let me look into this! When I shared the link the first time I used the setting for only people who have this link. Let me try it again and I’ll update my original post!
However, I should point that ITC Eras is a commercial font, and sites which offer it for free are likely doing so unlawfully.
The link to Helvetica downloads a mis-matched group of TrueType and OpenType fonts, from Apple and Adobe, and is also likely to be not legal.
The link to Times New Roman is for a font named “Times NewER Roman”, by URW+. It’s not clear if it’s a metrically equivalent free alternative, or a commercial font.
I know that you want to match a publisher’s style, but generally, it’s best to work with fonts that are available on Windows and MacOS, and those that come with Dorico; or fonts known to be open-source.
Sorry, one more thing: if your document has a Playback Template for Noteperformer, that doesn’t give people “free access to Noteperformer”. It just points to their own installation of NP (and any other libraries), if they have it.
Most people post with a Silent template, just to save file size, and allow people to configure their own playback.
Getting to the document itself: you’re using “Time Roman” (with no S), which is probably a “knock-off” copy.
I got told in the past that if I send someone a file that has a playback template that it does give them a “free” version of NP. Thanks for saying that the template looks nice! That means a lot! I’ll try and do a quick arrangement of something, if I have the time between work, sleep and life in general lol.
I think the quickest arrangement I could do would be Journey’s, “Don’t Stop Believin’”. If I’m currently off work this week. I’ll try to work diligently on it, and then I’ll upload a PDF file into my Google Drive.
You’ve spent a lot of time implementing the superscript ♭s, and you deserve respect for the result. However, I’m not sure if it’s worth it to recreate HL’s house style literally. All players with a ♭ in their layout name have page overrides (you edited the page directly rather than the page template). If someone uses the template and makes a small change in the First Page Template, it will not be applied to the layouts with the overrides. Furthermore, the template isn’t customizable if someone wants to use a different music font. All the baseline shifts will create a huge mess.
The important values for the frame with the Layout Name are really the left and top. If I unlock the right and bottom locks, then when I switch to Letter I get this:
Yes, but you can have the frames display correctly for the current flip-folder size and still give yourself flexibility if your output size ever changes in the future. For the left-aligned frame with the layout name, there is no benefit to locking the right and bottom constraints, and those inhibit potential future edits. For the frame with the arranger and lyricist, there is no benefit to locking the left and bottom constraints if you want it right-aligned and positioned a set distance from the top.
Hey @35TCB77 - I first want to say that this is such a creative and helpful contribution for marching arts arrangers and publishers that have recently transitioned to Dorico! The detail you took to convert most every aspect of the OG .mus template into a usable one for Dorico - from fonts to rastral sizing + spacing - is genuinely impressive! Having studied with and have done a bunch of Finale engraving work for Jay Bocook in recent years, I can safely say you’ve put in a ton of legwork here to make the Dorico version as accurate as possible!
No comments from me (just yet), but I’m super curious to test this out with some stock charts I’ve done in the past!
