You should set up the project with instruments/players/layouts organised around the formatted musical material you need to generate. If you have multiple clarinet lines, each requiring a separate part for performers to read from but which you want to display on a shared staff in the score, you should add a separate clarinet player for each part, and use condensing in the score.
You can adjust the sound routing in various ways, not only by player type: for example, you can use independent voice playback to route individual voices belonging to the same instrument to different endpoints to use different sounds.
There is a CC that you can set a value to in order to have NotePerformer play a line with 1 or more instruments. No need to spend too much time thinking about it before.
Thanks for all the advice. But I am still confused. Unless I am mistaken, whether the Violin (for example) is set up as a Section or a Single Player, it still plays back as a single violin. At least with the default HALion sounds. Somehow in this discussion I had the impression that a default Violin Section might be 8 violins (like a real orchestra), but when I tried setting that up from scratch, I could only get one violin into a section (not multiple violins). Am I missing something?
OK, now I think I see what is happening. The default Orchestra setups have Violin (and other section Strings) set up with HALion so that they “String Ensemble Sounds”; whereas, if you just go and set up a Violin player from scratch, it will default to a Solo Violin sound. Do I have that correct?
I’m not at my computer but if I had to guess I would say that if you’re selecting a violin when creating a section player, then it will be the “ensemble” patch, and vice versa.
Nope, I am still confused; at least as far as my understanding of the meaning of “Section Player” in Dorico. As far as I can tell, the difference between “Section Violin” and “Solo Violin” is nothing, except that for some templates, the “Section” instrument has been set to an ensemble sound (ie, violins instead of violin.) Other than that, the behavior of a Solo Instrument staff or Section Instrument Staff is exactly the same.
The other problem I run into (also related) is that most of the time I would like to indicate Divisi on one instrument part by simply entering the 2 notes on one stem. Dorico does this with no problem. Now, when I go back to “Unison” or “A2” I want to indicate that. But I can see no way that Dorico will let me do that, without Dorico deciding to split my instrument into 2 staff lines. OR I can enter “Violin 1” and “Violin 2” and then have them compress to one staff. Either of those 2 ways is far more complicated - at least for me - than just entering the single part as sometimes harmony, sometimes single line. This is a symphonic score that I created in pencil from decades ago. I don’t want to spend 3x longer copying out individual Part 1 and Part 2 parts, then hoping that the Dorico compress feature will work fine for an entire orchestral score (the documentation even states that this could be a problem). But, it would be nice if I could enter “Divisi” “A2” and/or “Unison” without Dorico forcing my music to split into ways that I don’t want it to do. So, what should I do? Should I just enter “Divisi” etc. as Text with no musical meaning, just so the players understand?
It seems to me that you are over-thinking matters. The playback sound is incidental and you can change that to suit. The reason for differentiating section from solo is because of engraving capabilities. After all, Dorico is an engraving tool.
Section Players can (but don’t have to) divide into all sorts of sub-groups, so Dorico provides tools to handle complex divisi, splitting one stave into many.
Solo Players can (but don’t have to) hold more than one instrument AND can (but don’t have to) be condensed with other solo players. Here Dorico provides tools to combine multiple staves into one (or more) or place multiple different instruments on a single stave.
Yes, often string parts do not need to divide into multiple staves to show divisi. In which case, simply use different voices/chords and text instructions. But if you do need multiple staves, then you will have to set up section players rather than solo players.