I’m trying to understand what the control flow is with instrument assignments and names.
I have a template for a show where the voice instrument names have been replaced by cast member names.
The objective of this setup is to use instrument names to show who’s singing at a given point, leveraging Dorico’s instrument change functionality.
Other times, each voice instrument (cast member) will have their own staff.
On later numbers, when reusing the template, the cast names will need to change depending on who’s on stage at the time.
I noticed odd behavior with renaming. Voice instruments which should not be related sometimes both change when I rename one of the voices.
I suspect this might be because different voices might have the lead, and sometimes one of the backgrounds may also be the same voice type.
What is the Dorico way to handle this? I got lost for hours in a game of whack-a-mole trying to get names straightened out with the right voice, without changing another voice when making changes to the name of the first one.
What is the linking behavior here? Does Dorico assume that voices sharing an endpoint are also going to share a name? Is it because endpoints are linked for each instrument choice? How can I create updated instances with correct names without activating this link behavior?
I’m trying to understand the control flow here. If I need a name change, it appears that changing the name is not the way to go about it, but rather I need to create a duplicate instrument and rename that? Or name the instance? What’s the starting point to achieve what I’m after?
But you have 1 player “Voice”, which has instruments “Maria” and “Tony”?
When the are singing apart, you can tell who’s singing by instrument switch label.
But when they’re singing a duet in the next song, you want both staves to appear?
Why don’t you create a player Maria with instrument Soprano and a player Tony with instrument Tenor. And hide staves when empty?
And use player names as staff labels.
Hi !
I’ve been using Dorico mainly for vocal music (opera, melodies, lieder…) and I’ve never been able to use it so that it would automatically do what you are trying to achieve. Even for choir, the condensing feature is not really advanced enough for using it (lyrics, especially).
What I have done is I have created a paragraph style as default, so I could give it a keycommand, it’s set to small capitals and I can add the name of the character whenever I need. Singers do not need individual parts, we work on vocal scores, and it doesn’t matter if some staves are shared by different singers — I’m not talking about playback here, because obviously, before Cantai (or similar) really becomes a thing (with enough languages so that it’s really useful), this is never a priority for these works.
It’s quite common for those scores with singers to have the names appear on the staff and not as labels (as would the instruments of the orchestra) so in the end, it’s not been a problem for me. Of course, if you’re bound to a specific housestyle, that’s another problem and you will have to create a specific workflow that will work for you…
My template is set up this way. There are other voices besides the leads in the template, for a cast choir, the name of which changes depending on the tune. Where I’m running into trouble is when updating the names that come in with the template.
My workflow includes exporting xml into Cantamus - divisi is not supported - so everybody needs their own line (most of the time). For vocal or piano/vocal parts, I’ve been adding staves and condensing via paste>reduce (which works very well with lyrics) for display in a piano/vocal or libretto part.
The thing that throws me, regardless of all that, is when I try to change a name (Instrument>Names) it causes unexpected results… such as a name I’ve already changed changing to something else, sometimes matching the new name in another Instrument with a number. When I change “Tony” to “Sam”, and “Shark 3” to “chor 3”, for example, when I make the change of “Tony” to “Sam,” chor 3" reverts to “Sam 2”. What is that? How does that happen? How do I prevent it? That’s my question.
No, in this instance that adds a layer of unmanageable complexity when it comes to staff names. I’m working with XML coming in from Finale, the import of which creates another flow in the template, and adds its own possibly conflicting (or not) staff names. Every song is in its own file.
For some tunes, when there’s no divisi, I want to be able to move the instruments to other players, which is why I started naming the instruments instead of the players, to use the instrument change functionality built in to Dorico (as mentioned in the OP). Unfortunately, renaming instruments is having unintended consequences, and I want to find out what’s going on, why that’s happening, why renaming one instrument would rename others in the same score. How do I create enough tenors to go around without them renaming each other, is my question, in a nutshell
I think this is correct. If 2 different staves are sharing an endpoint, this is how this is gonna happen (changing one name changes the other)… so, if the lead vocal is a tenor, I’d need to create a separate new “Instrument” for it, and give it its own distinct endpoint in Play.
The mistake I made was in not doing that, but rather re-using VST instances. I would need to create a separate VST device/ Instrument instance for each cast name.