I rarely enthuse in public, but I have to say how splendidly Dorico deals with the traditional piano duet format, i.e. Secondo on left and Primo on right. Now a custom part with appropriate frames does the job. (I seem to recollect Daniel mentioned the possibility in one of his pre-release blogs, but seeing it in action is brilliant! Thank you.)
Just one small thing: having set the duet part up, I rename it, with remarkable originality, as ‘Piano Duet score’, but every time I reload it, it re-assumes the name of ‘Custom Score’. Not a problem, but perhaps worth a look?
oldlayclerk, is there any chance you could upload a blank copy of this piano duet layout on here, for me to use as a template please? I like the sound of having the Secondo on the left, and Primo on the right, like you mentioned, in Dorico!
T Earl, you can watch Daniel explaining the piano duet layout here:
Ah yes, that must be where I saw it.
Of course, Daniel explains it better than I ever could, but here’s an excerpt of what I have been working on (Haydn’s Symphony no.52) with the piano duet layout as ‘Custom score’. There is much still to do (e.g. I have yet to work out how to get the tempo mark to appear on Piano 2 (Secondo)).
Haydn 52 pno duet excerpt.zip (206 KB)
Have you tried to change the Layout options, Staves and Systems page, System objects chapter… Maybe tick Keyboards (see picture) ?
Hope it helps !
See if using the Layout Options for your duet layout will help you put tempo indications on each part/page of the duet.
There’s a bug that causes custom score layout names to be reset when the project is reopened. We hope to fix this in the next update.
I’m glad you’ve been able to make use of the page layout features to produce a piano four-hands layout. It’s cool, isn’t it?
Thank you oldlayclerk et al. This is all very helpful! I have some work coming up in the near future which would involve me preparing a large scale piano duet for publication. I’m really hoping to use Dorico for this and therefore I’m trying to soak up as many of the idiosyncrasies of the program I can! I’m pretty certain everything is already in the program for me to do it, let’s just hope it isn’t an arpeggio-line laden piece, however, I am sure there are ways to work around it!
Cool, indeed, Daniel!
Thank you, Marc and Derrek, for the system object lead. I now have ‘keyboards’ checked; however, it seems to think the two pianos are just one group (as they could well be in a larger score) and only the top one needs the tempo mark when they are printed together, even side by side.
I’ll probably just use a text box or frame.
Then this is something that must be fixed ! No doubt D’s team will take it into account, their listening capacity is really the most valuable asset of this amazing program.