I’m working on a percussion score right now, and I’m not sure how to label it correctly in Dorico. Right now each part is labeled solely as the instrument currently playing on that system, when I need it to say, for example, “Perc. IV (Tam)”. This is the suggested marking in Behind Bars, but I can’t figure out how to get Dorico to do it. I’d also be willing to just have it say “Perc. #”, and put the text in manually, which is far more tedious, but I can’t figure out how to get that to work either.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Diana,
In Setup mode you can make changes to the Player (better to think of them as players who could - if wished - use more than one instrument, rather than instruments themselves in Dorico) are made by right-clicking (CTRL-clicking) on their name (e.g. Tam-tam) and choosing from the resulting menu.
And/or by first clicking on the little white chevron (>) to the left of their name; then by similarly choosing from the menu which appears - as in these screen grabs.
Pages here in the help guide may also be of use.
Good luck!
Hi Mark,
Sorry, I was a little unclear. Right now I’m using players properly, and there are instrument changes, which causes the issue. It seems Dorico’s baseline is to put the currently playing instrument in the label, not the player’s name. I need the player’s name labeled, preferably with the instrument name, but I’m not picky.
Diana,
Does this page help?
I believe you can make the changes to players’/instruments’ names which you want using those menus in Setup Mode without adversely affecting the assignment of actual instrument to actual staff in any one flow.
I would say to utilize a percussion kit for the unpitched percussion instruments. You can then name the kit “Perc. 1”, “Perc. 2”, etc.
You would get a 5 line staff, grid, or independent lines (depending on how you set the layout options), and you can add a “percussion legend” above each instrument to show which instrument is playing.
This only works with unpitched percussion, though. If they go between pitched and unpitched this method will not work.
Robby
I think it’ll work with that, but it’ll require me to insert all the instrument changes manually, which leads to another question: is there a way to suppress the instrument change text globally?
Which method will work?
If they are all unpitched percussion instruments and you are using a percussion kit, selecting on a note, right clicking, and under the percussion menu is a “percussion legend” feature. This will put the name of the name of the instrument above the staff.
Robby
