Orchestral sketch with one grand staff per section?

Dorico
1

I would like to make an orchestral sketch without focusing on assigning notes to individual instruments, say contrabass, celli, viola, etc.
What I mean is basically having one grand staff for each orchestral section: woodwinds, brass, strings, maybe percussion, so I can quickly sketch out my ideas, but only orchestrate them later for individual players.

I already done it with assigning so-called “ensemble patches” in one of my VSTs, but was wondering if there’s built-in functionality for this task in Dorico. Hopefully I explained myself well… thanks!

2

AFAIK No such template is built in.

You can, of course, build your own pseudo-template and use it as the basis for future projects.

3

is this any different than having 4 piano parts and just re-setting the vst for each part to a woodwind, brass, string, percusssion sound ?

4

Other than adjusting the non-percussive instruments to use CC7 or CC11 to control the volume of the sustaining instruments, probably not much.

5

I guessed I would probably need to build a template of some sorts for this. Do you know if the bundled HALion got such full 88-key “ensemble” patches?

6

Look for the HALion patches with GM (General Midi) in the name. They extend over the full MIDI range, as required by the GM standard.