Hi everyone and let me firstly say that i appreciate all your help and expertise! I’m a new Dorico user, coming from sibelius. Been taking a few days to learn the ins and outs of Dorico and i must say i’m very impressed.
I predominantly to arrangements for folklore music/dance groups. Typically 4 vocal parts, and 8-10 instruments. The family of instruments are a Croatian instrument called the tambura. A stringed instrument. I will link an example below.
We have instruments as follows. Bisernice (smaller high pitched), Brac (larger body, and an octave in sound lower), Cello (that is played with a pick and strapped on like a guitar, don’t think traditional celo. Also an octave lower in sound compared to the Brac), and Bugarija (plays chords, rhythm) and a stand up bass (rhythm).
I realize there are no samples for this instrument but i’m wondering if i can get any ideas as to what to choose sound wise through dorico. Anything clean sounding would be great.
Since i can’t put links here, to get an idea of what i’m looking at you can type in “lado gracanska polka” into youtube and it’s the first one that comes up.
Hello @cet.b and welcome to the forum.
For the beginning the easiest way would be to choose “standard” string instruments like violin, viola, violoncello, depending on which range you need.
For Bisernice you can probably input a mandoline, then “Edit Instrument Name” in SetUp Mode. In other words you put in a Player with a Mandoline, then change its name to Bisernice, you put in a player with a Viola, then change its name to Brac and so on.
After that it is only a matter of inputting the music and putting a clef of your choice at the very beginning of the players.
If you are more at home in Dorico at a later stage, you can setup your own instrument definitions and use them in your future projects.
Looking further into detail, I read up about Bisernice, and you might need to produce a Transposing Layout for the Bisernice part. That’s no problem if you use Dorico Pro.
I really appreciate the response, thank you! By transposing layout do you mean using that so the sound is played an octave higher ? I figured that out and it worked well. For all the “bisernice”, “brac”, and “celo” i just used a piano sound the adjusted the octaves for each. But i can try mandoline as well.
It depends whether your Bisernica is tuned
“c-g-d” or “g-d-a”
If it’s tuned c-d-g: I read that the players still read the music if it was tuned in g-d-a. Only in this case you could provide the player with a transposing layout. That’s as if you hand a violin player a viola and provide him with a part notated as if he/her would still play on a violin.