Hello — a few questions regarding writing for two percussionists, each of whom has a kit and some pitched instruments.
When both players are on their respective kits, the percussion lines are grouped, joined by a barline through both staves. When one player switches to a pitched instrument, the grouping is severed, but if a second player switches to a pitched instrument, the grouping reappears — though NOT at the point where that instrument enters, but at the point where the courtesy clef / instrument change occurs (the third bar in this screenshot).
1.) is there a global control that allows the two percussion parts to be grouped or ungrouped for the duration of the flow/project, regardless of whether the players are on kits or pitched instruments?
2.) is there a way to force the percussion clef changes (between kit and pitched instrument) to appear ONLY at the bar where a new instrument enters, and no sooner?
There’s no way to force the change from unpitched to pitched and vice versa to happen immediately before the entry of the new instrument; this has been requested before but it’s not currently possible. It is on our backlog for future implementation.
When you say “grouped”, do you mean bracketed together? If so, Dorico won’t bracket pitched and unpitched percussion together by default, but you can use a bracketing change in Engrave mode to create a custom bracket if desired.
Thank you, Daniel. There is much to admire in the way Dorico handles percussion, but understanding how it works differently from other staves is one of the most challenging aspects for a new user to get accustomed to.
Seconding the desire to have the possibility of global clef changes directly before the new instrument enters, and also the ability to hide rests in 5-line percussion staves, to make aleatoric box notation equally easy for percussion kits as for other instruments.
Just a final related comment: I would find it helpful to have the option to keep the short staff name always as “Perc. 2” rather than having it vary automatically with each instrument change (an advantageous feature, often but not always).
I am finding myself in awkward situations often like this, where the player has another instrument on the previous page, so the staff name (“Glock.”), the instrument change instruction (“To Glock.”) and the new instrument name (“Glock.”) all appear in short succession — somewhat redundant and even potentially slightly confusing.
We will have an option in the next version of Dorico to allow you to use the player’s name as the staff label for this kind of eventuality. (Instrument changes would still use the individual instrument names, of course.)
Rather than starting a new topic, I’ll try adding some related questions here.
My goal in a large orchestra piece is to have percussion player staff label “Percussion 1” / “Pc. 1” and specific instruments labeled at changes and reminders for the instruments in parenthesis on all even pages (following page turns). I’ve reduced a large score file down to percussion only to clearly show my questions:
I can’t get Percussion 3’s staff label to change to Percussion 3 despite having selected “show player name instead of instrument name.”
Pc. 2’s first note is on vibraslap. I can of course add text to show that, like I did for “Mar.” in Pc. 1, but is there a way to simply insert/force the current instrument name?
Can I turn off the redundant clef change switching from Marimba to Xylophone and back? I understand it is a different instrument, but they are both notated in normal treble clef with xylophone of course sounding an octave higher. (I would also prefer the clef for instrument changes to appear where the new instrument enters, but I see this is already much-requested).
I guess I’ll need to add each instrument reminder manually? It would be a great option to have the current percussion instrument’s short name in parentheses below staff label.
If you don’t need a grand staff for the Marimba, go to Setup, click the Marimba, click Change Instrument and select the the 1-Staff version. The extra clefs go away.
Fred - using your idea, I added a second (one-staff) marimba to the part and moved the music for this passage there and this takes care of the redundant clef issue. Thanks again.
There’s no capability to show the player name instead of the instrument name for percussion kits using the grid presentation type at the moment; this is something that will be introduced in the next update, when it arrives.
No, you’ll need to add that manually.
For a five-line staff you can use a percussion legend:
but for the other presentation types you will indeed need to add them manually.
