I found this illustration on the internet which purports to be from Dorico 3.0
But I cannot figure out how to create a grand staff like this with the four parts labelled inthis way.
I tried adding “Choir reduction” in Setup but I just get a single grand staff with the word “choir” written where you might see “piano” ie: between the staffs.
Condensing is taking two (or more) independent Player staves and merging them together in the score (while maintaining separate staves for parts and other layouts). So if you wanted to do this with Condensing, you would create four separate Players: SATB – and then condense them together in the Score Layout.
Arguably, for vocal writing (where you are hopefully not producing separate parts for each voice), there is little need to use Condensing. You could simply use one Soprano Player, labelled “Soprano / Alto”, and one Bass Player, labelled Tenor / Bass.
There is also Dorico’s Divisi feature, which splits one Player’s staff into two or more staves, each of which can have its own label. This may be of more use if the staff list changes in the piece.
Yes, this is exactly what I did. But in order to do “paste special - condense” I need to add a Grand staff.
It all works exactly as I’d expected (except for some spurious wrong direction tails) and hats off to Dorico for doing such a good job - but my Grand staff says “Choir” as an entire thing, whereas my little screengrab (which does refer to Dorico so I’m assuming that Dorico is capable of that labelling) labels separately and therefore far more intuitively, but I don’t know how to do it - (forget the erroneous tenor-oriented 8ve treble clef - naturally, I would want a bass clef.)
There is no “Paste Special > Condense”. There is “Reduce”, which creates a merged copy of your notes into one staff.
Condensing is done by toggling “Condense” in the Edit menu. As said, it automatically merges separate staves just for that layout, and you can ‘un-condense’ by toggling the command again.
What you are doing is ‘destructively’ creating two voices on one Player’s staff.
Still, for choral stuff it’s often the method I use, seeing as real condensing is unpredictable where lyrics are concerned.
See What would be the best way to create a choir score in this way? - #2 by pianoleo
Thanks! Perfect that’s exactly what I need.
And yes I think I’ve been getting some of the vernacular mixed up (condense / reduce) but you know what I’ve been trying to get at - so thanks for the help.
Certainly doing the paste special into the empty grand staff works an absolute treat with minor repairs needed.
