One Staff Label for Multiple (Pitched and Non-Pitched) Instruments

Dorico
1

Hello all,

My goal is to have 3 staves—one pitched percussion and 2 unpitched / single-line percussion—which all share a bracket/brace and a single staff label: “Percussion”.

I tried to ago about this in two different ways: (A) One player holding 3 instruments, and (B) three players holding 1 instrument each

(A) I turned off “Allow Instrument Changes” in Layout Options to allow for all three instruments to be visible (hoping that won’t come back to bite me), then I selected that player to “Show Player Name Instead of Instrument Name” (and changed the player name to “Percussion”), but now it just labels all three staves “Percussion”.

(B) I selected “Group between staves” for “Staff labels for identical adjacent instruments held by single players” in Engraving Options and, with that, I was able to finagle a way to have 2 players called “Percussion” condense their player labels, but the pitched staff is excluded. Ithink the reason why Dorico didn’t include the pitched staff is because it’s not “identical” with the other staves.

Groups labels aren’t really what I’m looking for.
I’m using Dorico 4, but I would love to know if Dorico 5 would have any solutions for me—especially considering the new Instrument Editor feature.
I looked at other forum topics before posting, but didn’t find any that related exactly to what I am looking for.

Here is what I have right now: (A) top; (B) bottom
image

And here’s what I am trying to achieve:
image

And advice would be greatly appreciated!
– Morgan

2

Have a read about Player Groups, it might give you a solution. From what you’ve posted it doesn’t sound like you’ve tried this method or is that what “Groups labels aren’t really what I’m looking for” was referring to?

3

Thank you for the response.
Unfortunately, “Groups” aren’t exactly what I am looking for, as the group labels are vertical and encompass player/instrument names, whereas I need the player/instrument name to be “Percussion”.

4

Ahhh I understand where you’re coming from now.

Maybe, as a workaround, you could try adding your “Percussion” text as a custom Paragraph Style (That is the same as Staff Labels) and drag?

Although I’m not sure how to deal with the labels that would already be there lol