My background is mostly writing for ensembles of 10-15 players. I now have the opportunity to write several projects for a full orchestra. I am fairly fluent with Dorico, and I feel reasonably confident in producing the orchestrsl music itself, but I’m wondering about the process steps that others with far more large orchestra writing/orchestration experience using Dorico than I have would recommend.
I’m thinking of doing my version of a ‘short score’ using a piano sketch (in Dorico) as a reference, followed by creating a short score with 3 grand staves (WW, brass, strings) and percussion staff. I’m thinking I could then use the PasteSpecial –> Explode command to move each of the grand staves into their appropriate section, realizing that I would have to make tweaks but thinking that this would be easier than trying to orchestrate a full ‘blank page’ of 25-30 staves from scratch.
Does this process make sense, or am I missing a better way to approach the problem? As far as I can tell, there is no way to produce a ‘short score’ in Dorico that would look like the standard hand-written short score, and then be able to place the various components of that short score sketch into the proper staves in Dorico.
I think your general approach is reasonable. Remember you can create sketch grand stave instruments for ww, strings and brass. You might also look at creating separate layouts for each to work on.
Personally I don’t find explode much use for orchestrations, but it would really depend on the style of music.
It is simple to move/copy selected notes from a short score to an instrument using alt-N/alt-M.
When I compose, I write directly into the full score, but I engraved an opera which had a finished piano/vocal before the composer started orchestrating. When it was time to do the FS, I pulled in the reduction from the PV and had a great experience using filters and staff movement/duplication. I made a jump bar alias for each filter I used (ft for top note, fb for bottom note, fu for upstem voice 1, fd for downstem voice 1), and I programmed keyboard shortcuts for “Copy to staff above/below.” The combination of these things allowed me to filter and copy music very easily from the reduction to the orchestral staves. Also, don’t forget about Lock Duration—for sections with moving chords, I often found it faster to simply copy a passage, duplicate it across multiple staves, and then use lock duration to input the correct pitches very quickly. FWIW, I did not use the Explode function at all through that process.
Thanks fo both Janus and AConstantino. I think I’m ready to go, knowing how to use a couple of Dorico functions but also realizing there is no magic button that I was missing…
