In John Barron’s youtube video of percussion notation Drum Notation Examples, Inc Stem Directions and Options | Discover Dorico with John Barron - YouTube , he inputs a series of triplets after setting the tuplet up only once. He says (at 6min15): “you can carry on doing this” and he doesn’t repeat the triplet command. But when I do this I get the terrible mess shown in the picture [dorico drums]. Both instruments are in the same voice. Is this a problem introduced in version 3.5 (which is what I’m using)? (Dropbox - dorico drums.jpeg - Simplify your life)
Certainly it is very easy to get into a mess of nested tuplets when inputting them in a percussion kit showing a five-line staff, yes, through no fault of yours. This is an area of focus for us to improve at the moment (we are tackling this as part of the same work that will allow rests on percussion kits to be edited).
In the meantime, although it’s less convenient, you may well find that temporarily switching your percussion kit to use the individual instruments presentation type (on the Players page of Layout Options) makes it easier to create the necessary tuplets. When you then change the presentation type back to showing a five-line staff you should find that things look better.
Thank you! In fact the option you suggest may be more practical for the music I’m writing because I’m sketching it and will freely add and remove percussion instruments as it progresses. But I’m now trying to copy a project from another educational video by JB, with Xylophone, vibraslap and temple blocks etc., and when I selected Layout Options > Percussion > 5-line staff, a five-line staff is shown but with the single bar witha note for vibraslap still on one line only. Can this be overridden so that the five lines continue throughout?
Yes, absolutely: you just need to make sure that you add your new vibraslap instrument to the existing percussion kit, which you can do by right-clicking the player in the Players panel in Setup mode and choosing Combine Instruments into Kit from the context menu.
Thanks! That worked. But aren’t we then back with the problems with inputting tuplets, editing rests etc. So perhaps this should be saved as last?
No, you can still display all of the instruments in your kit as individual single-line instruments, using the options on the Players page of Layout Options.