The percussion parts in my symphonic work continue to be an absolute headache to me in Dorico.
First, I had to find a way to make cues show on five lines in unpitched percussion. I did the workaround suggested in the forum, assigning a flute to each percussion player only for entering the cues. I renamed the instruments to “cues” to avoid Dorico telling the player to “take flute”. Of course, I can hide the instrument change labels by changing the text to an empty space in the properties. But what I cannot change is the staff label at the beginning of a new system when it says “cues”. The solution I found in the forum was to set a system break and choose to not show the system label at that particular place in the properties. However, this has a very unfortunate side effect, in that the indent disappears, and that looks really stupid. So it goes from this:
to this:
I can’t deliver a part looking like this. So what’s the solution here? How do I make the staff label not show, but the indent staying the same?
IIdeally, I would want to be able to simply set a custom text for the staff lable at a chosen place, so that I could put in the name the player is ACTUALLY playing next (Clash Cymbal), but that seems to be simply not possible? So no name would at least be better than “Cues 2”).
So I tried another workaround now by simply changing the name of the instrument to nothing, in which case Dorico just shows a “1” in the part of the first player and a “2” in the part of the second player. That’s slightly better, but the indent problem persists, although it looks a bit less stupid:
Does anyone have a solution to this? Why does Dorico not let us set a custom staff label text at a particular place?
And first of all, if we didn’t need this workaround to make cues show in unpitched percussion, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. It really makes no sense to me why cues should not show on five lines in unpitched percussion.
And, percussion kit is not an option, since I found out all dynamics and everything disappear if I combine the instruments in a kit now, so I don’t want to do this.
. I simply changed the names of the “cue instrument” to 8 empty spaces in one player and 9 in the other. It still doesn’t look perfect, but better than before.