This has happened a few times now, and I can’t understand why.
I start out with one organ instrument in a file, a simple hymn. Then I save this file to a new name and add more instruments (3 other organs). I then try to change the 1st organ to a choir instrument, but the options do not appear (so I add a choir instrument).
I’m not able to change the first organ to another instrument. All the other instruments can change, but not the first one. When I try to perform the operation, nothing happens. The list of instruments does not appear. Thanks for your help.
Instead of selecting Change Instrument, click on the " + " to add an instrument and then delete the recalcitrant one. Change Instrument will then hopefully become available for the newly-added instrument.
The reason that Change Instrument is non-functional in this project is that at some point in the past, you’ve created an extra staff for that instrument, which unfortunately rules it out of being able to have its instrument changed. Equally unfortunately there’s no good way for you to tell this yourself (I have to use my magic powers to divine this information).
What I suggest you do is create a new player with an Organ attached, copy and paste the music from the existing Organ player to the new player’s Organ, then delete the old player and its instrument. Now you should be able to change its instrument with impunity.
I know this thread is three years old, but this is what showed up by Google.
I understand combining instruments under this circumstance, but I would like to request that this behavior be fixed so that I can combine them even after adding an extra staff.
Moving instruments between players and creating the instrument changes automatically is very powerful ONLY it still can be done after adding an extra staff.
In the interest of use-cases, may I ask what instrument changes the number of staves? Could you add an instrument for each variant to the player so Dorico would still do the switching?
@Mark_Johnson Thank you for your response. I am sorry, I think I was misunderstanding something. What I was trying to do was not instrument change, but it was condensing two same instruments into one stave, such as Fl.1 and Fl.2 into Fl.1&2. I was doing this manually by moving one instrument to the other in the Setup view, rather than using the condensing function. This ends up only moving the instrument in the Setup view without changing anything in other views.
This is off-topic, but it is not what Dorico supports, is it?
Yes, that is condensing different types of instruments such as the Oboe and Cor Anglais, and it worked as I intended. However, the other example I wanted to do was to condense the same type of instruments, for example, Fl.1 and Fl.2, by just moving the Flute instrument in the Flute 2 player into Flute 1 player, because I thought moving an instrument to another player would manually create condensed players.
I suppose they are different tools but rather than using condensing function, I prefer manually moving instruments in the Setup view because that would give me more flexible options. I hope this request will be on the future update list.
Nope, it doesn’t work like that at all. Condensing is a separate function, best used as it was designed. I don’t think I understand what feature you are requesting with this. Feel free to explain further.
I think I was confused between Players and Instruments. I attached a screen as an example. So I initially wrote Fl.1 and Fl.2 separately and moved Fl.2 into Fl.1, thinking it would create Fl.1-2 staff. However, it is still Fl.1 “Player” just holding two Flute “Instruments”.
I think this is a typical Dorico newbie pitfall that those who come from Sibelius/Finale would have, and I think one of the main reasons that I was confused is because the all content in Fl.2 score still remains. It does not reflect the change I made in the Setup view.
Now I understand that Dorico handles Players and Instruments in a different way and what I was doing was nonsense. The only thing that could make things less confusing was to change the player name of the score page to “Empty-handed player” to automatically reflect the change of the Setup page.
The staff labels on the page reflect the name of the instrument. In your screenshot, both Flute 1 and Flute 2 are held by the “Flute 1 & Flute 2” player, so the Empty-handed Player (who is holding no instruments: their hands are empty) is not represented on the page at all.
Wow… OK. Now I understood. It was much more complicated than I thought. In that case, it would be better if Dorico showed an empty staff to avoid confusion. Thank you so much for the explanation anyway.
In Setup Mode, you can drag Flute 2 to the empty-handed player. If there’s already music in Flute 2, it will be carried over.
A player can ‘hold’ different instruments, like flute and piccolo, and switch between them. In Galley view, you’ll see a staff for each instrument.
I think perhaps you’ve still not quite understood the players/instruments/staves concept.
As in real life, players can hold one or multiple instruments. Each instrument will have a minimum of one staff. If no instrument exists, no staff exists.
There are situations in which it’s useful to be able to have an empty-handed player, and there’s separate functionality for creating Tacet sheets for players that don’t have anything to do within a particular Flow (or even Project).
Showing a blank stave for an empty-handed player would go against the principle that each instrument gets 1+ staff/staves, though, and it would be a useless thing to have on the page, as you wouldn’t be able to put anything in it (as adding notes to a stave doesn’t, and shouldn’t, magically create instruments or players).
I think, also, that there is some confusion about the word condensing as Dorico uses it. In Dorico, condensing is a technical term describing the process of writing multiple instruments on multiple staves held by multiple players and then telling the program to transcribe them onto a single staff in the (conductor’s) score when expedient.
What Sibelius and Finale have done with multiple parts on a single staff (often using multiple layers, which Dorico would call voices) might better be called combining rather than condensing.
Yes, this is a very useful concept so that I can freely move instruments between players including the empty-handed player.
I thought I understood the concept of “players” and “instruments” when I moved from Finale, but it was not until I created a huge orchestral score. When these are involved with staves, it becomes a bit complicated but I will try to get used to it.
Next time, I try the old-school(?) two voices in one staff from the beginning rather than two separate staff to see which will be suitable for me (though that is not utilizing Dorico’s powerful feature. )
Don’t feel the need to do that! You had it right first time: a separate player per… well, human performer who will be playing music. Ie a flute 1 player, and a flute 2 player.
They can then each have their own part, without distractions or you needing to maintain duplicate versions of their music (ie a manually condensed staff for the score, and separate staves for parts)
Dorico’s condensing feature takes separate parts and simply shows them on shared staves in the score. One source for those parts means if you need to correct or change anything, you only need to do that once and all the parts and score will remain in sync.
Hi.
Yes, after spending some time figuring out the instrument change, I’m now diving into learning condensing by visiting forums and watching videos from John Barron, etc.
This feature is actually very powerful and practical, especially when you consider that the players are real humans, not just notes on a staff. I’m just accustomed so much to the old way (writing two flutes per staff from the beginning), which is faster and feels more natural to me right now. Still learning Dorico!
Though this is a bit off-topic again, my wishlist regarding condensing so far includes the ability to manually adjust the length of the musical phrase that Dorico considers as one phrase. As John Barron explains in this video (https://youtu.be/glKy4WcoDPY?t=2080), sometimes Dorico keeps two notes separate when condensing because it is taken as part of phrases that are not identical in the long term. I am adding the Condensing Change manually as suggested, but this is tedious work, and it would be better if I could also globally set the phrase length in the Engraving Options. For example, setting the minimum number of consecutive shared notes that Dorico automatically makes a2. There may be downsides to this that I’m not aware of yet, but it’s just my wish
What are you doing when you institute a condensing change? In some cases all one has to do is open the change panel, choose the instruments, and confirm it without doing much else, a very quick operation.
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