Need a little advice with condensing vocal parts

Dorico
1

Hi all, I was hoping for a little bit of advice from some Dorico pros before I set out on a big project - I want to make sure I’m doing things as efficiently as possible instead of changing my mind halfway through and losing a bunch of prep time.

I’m prepping a rehearsal vocal score for a show, and I really want to take advantage of the condense options to make it clear when someone has a lead line or a harmony line.

There’ll be 4 singers who’ll all have solo lines at different times, and the other 3 will usually be singing harmony.

So I think the best solution is to have 3 staves throughout: piano, solo vox, and harmony vox. Obviously the singers will constantly change in these groups, am I right in thinking I can use condense changes to reflect this? Is there a way of creating a ‘condense preset’ or similar so that I can easily change to 1 of the 4 different condense options I’ll need? Or am I going about this the complete wrong way?!

Any advice gratefully received, as this is my first time using Dorico in this way.

Thanks!

2

The best solution partially depends on whether the solo voices will at any point need a part with only their music in, or whether they’ll always be reading from a vocal score/combined part.

If the latter, it might actually be easier to use a single player for each “section”/staff that you want to see, and use up-stem/down-stem voices if there’s concurrent material. If I remember correctly, condensing lyrics doesn’t always produce the desired result (i.e. lyrics can get duplicated both above and below the staff).

If the former, yes you can use condensing changes to control condensing within each system if required.

You could always do a test project with a short extract and see how it feels to do both methods and find out which you prefer?