Problems changing instrument

Dorico
1

I am a complete newbie – Finale since the 80’s but day 2 of Dorico (this will be worth it). I am trying hard to RTFM before resorting to this forum!

I started out my first piece selecting Piano as my instrument (grand staff, two staves). Then I decided, "no, this needs to be an organ piece (THREE staves: grand staff + pedal (bass clef) staff). So I selected Setup view and changed the instrument to Organ 3 staves. But no pedal staff is showing up.

What might you suggest?

Thank you in advance,

2

Don’t worry, William, we welcome Finale refugees here and we will be gentle with you :slight_smile:

I just tried this and I found that the extra third staff appears as expected. Perhaps give this specific procedure a try:

  1. Switch to Setup mode.
  2. Expand the card belonging to the player with the Piano instrument.
  3. You’ll see the small label that says ‘Piano’. Hover the mouse over this so the chevron > appears.
  4. Now click and from the context menu choose Change Instrument.
  5. Choose Keyboard > Organ > 3 staves from the picker.

That should do it! If it doesn’t, please feel free to zip up your project and upload it here and I’ll take a look for you.

3

The steps you enumerated are what I did. I also tried closing my file/Dorico and relaunching/reloading … still no pedal staff. Attached please find my dorico zip file. I am grateful for your help!
delta.zip (497 KB)

4

William, I think you’ve uncovered a bug, as I can replicate this here with your project and with a trivial new project:

  1. Create a Piano.
  2. Add some notes.
  3. Ensure that the lower staff contains more than one voice, like so:

  1. Try changing instrument to Organ. It doesn’t appear to give you a third stave.

In reality, it DOES give you a third stave: if you select anything on the lower stave of the grand staff and hit M, the pedal stave will appear and the note will cross-stem down accordingly.

The problem is, you can’t actually get the caret to jump down to the pedal stave so you can’t type into it. You can’t Duplicate to Staff Below, either.

The easiest workaround I can think of is:

  1. Create a new player.
  2. Assign an Organ to that player.
  3. Select everything on the Piano staves and copy and paste to the Organ staves - you may need to do this one staff at a time.
  4. Switch back to Setup mode and delete the Organ player.
    (5. You’ll probably want to select the whole of the lower stave of the grand staff, right-click, go Filter > Voices > Downstem Voice 1, then hit Alt+M to move to the pedal staff)
5

Regarding find a bug – hey, I’m here to help! Your workaround worked just fine. Thanks!