Hello, I’m working on my first band piece in Dorico (after 30 years in Finale). I watched the Dorico video about it, and I think I have it all down except for one thing. It doesn’t seem to display the name of the first instrument. This part has Mark Tree - Snare - Tambourine. At the start, it just shows the notes, but no indication that is it Mark Tree. After that, all the instrument changes are labeled correctly. Is there a setting to show the initial instrument name, or do I just need to add this as text?
Thanks!
Hi @westla,
there are two possibilities (A. using instrument changes - B. using a percussion kit, which I would recommend)
A.
in your case, where you use Instrument Changes, there is a Layout Option Show instrument change label at start of flow (for the desired layout/s):
Result:
Dorico file example A.:
instrument changes-show first instrument.dorico (525.5 KB)
B.
if you instead use a Percussion Kit, where all the three instruments live…:
…you can use Percussion Legends for this (if you are using the 5-lines visualisation of your kit). You can also assign a shortcut for it:
Add-on:
you could also create a new “Percussion legend” flow, uncheck it from the Full score and check it for the Percussion layout. Then in the Percussion part layout, you insert a music frame that shows this new flow, with the appropriate filters set in the music frame, at the beginning of your Percussion part (if you create the music frame directly into the music area/layout, you have the advantage that the flow heading will not be shown, even if this creates a page override, so take care…)
You can then set a fake staff label as text, with avoid collision deactivated, and positioned manually. Then you can create a system break just to set a smaller space size in the properties, for this legend staff.
Workflow, Result and Dorico file example:
Dorico file example B.:
percussion legend and PL as new flow.dorico (532.2 KB)
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Thanks for the great response. I had already created the kit (so I could use a 5 line staff), but when I did that the names of the instruments went away. Using the Percussion Legends, am I corect to assume I need to click on every change to show the name?
Yes. You can also use Option(Alt)+click to copy paste the legend in different locations, and Dorico will intelligently adapt the name to what you click on (or use a custom shortcut, as explained earlier).
You can create/show the legend for the sounding instrument (selecting only one note of that instrument and applying the command for example) or the legend for all instruments (selecting notes of multiple instruments, or extending the legend for the sounding instrument, dragging the right control point that Dorico creates when adding a legend: so that the legend region extend over multiple instruments music, and their names are added automatically to the legend):
But actually, for such a simple case, you would probably need to put one Legend for all instruments only at the beginning of the score/part (or using the extra percussion legend flow/music frame), and using different noteheads(*), it should be clear to the percussionist what he/she needs to play.
(*)
Here a visual guide on how to set different desired notehead sets to your instrument/playing techniques (in this simple case each instrument has only one playing technique/notehead set):
Also see this further post, for further explanations:
and here on how to copy the legends from score to parts layouts: