Hi, I’m trying to do something a bit tricky - I’m writing for percussion ensemble, and I’d like to do a somewhat complicated setup with the arrangement where the player covers different instruments with each hand. For example, Glock in the left and Crotales in the right.
I was thinking of this as a single player with multiple instruments, but this doesn’t seem to work out with Dorico’s logic.
I’m imagining two different ways of notating - either two staves with cross-staff beaming to show this as a connected line (or maybe without cross-staff beaming at all and just leave it as multiple staves?), or on one staff and using up and down stems to separate the instruments out. The latter is probably better? Maybe I’m on the right track here and should just disable the automatic labeling system and just use text to denote the different roles of the up and down voices? I’m also failing to find where to completely disable the instrument labels though.
Could you elaborate? I could see how a percussion kit could have each line and space assigned to either Glock or Crotales, but this is just one bar. How would this work when I decide to reverse the parts and have the Eb on Glock and the C of Crotales next?
I’m just getting started on this project, this isn’t just a singular bar that needs fixing but I’m looking for a system that can handle this as I write out the whole piece.
Hi @Composerbell, as percussion kits are not compatible with pitched percussions, your second method would work.
To hide the changes labels, you can Select More them (or use a Marquee selection or Command(Control)+click), and set a custom label with an empty space in Engraving option:
Then you can rename the full and short player names, and use the player name as staff label for the needed layouts. (To make the line break you can edit the name in a text editor, with a line break, and copy then it into the name fields):
Ohhh thank you! This is looking workable. I’m thinking I’ll make it Station 1, Station 2, etc, but then I can just use staff text to label the relevant instruments above and below as needed (since I’m intending more than just these two at station 1, and having everything listed out on every stave would be…dense). This also deals with them playing simultaneously, as the stem direction defines LH and RH and they can match up that way.
However, as you can see, there’s a question of collisions when they blend together now. That could get rather time consuming if I have to move each beam every time there’s a collision. Since this isn’t condensing, I’m not sure what setting I’d be looking for to try and fix this - if such a setting even exists. Quick changes like this is probably not something Steinberg anticipated.
Oh wow, it was never going to occur to me that straight flags would clean up the image so much! That makes more sense to me than the others, which seem like they’ll result in a lot of strangely long stems at points where they don’t need to be. But the straight flags look decent as a style and clean it up quite a bit!
