Hi everybody,
In choral music, I am trying to use dynamics, including hairpins, above the top choral staff, in between the two choral staves, and below the bottom choral staff. It seems that Dorico only allows me to place 2 of these three. Someone online said you can click multiple voices on the staff, and each can have their own independent dynamics, but I can’t get this to work.
Anyone have a thought?
If playback is not important, you could enter the dynamics for the altos, select these dynamics and set their Placement property to Below. Then enter the dynamics for the sopranos. Finally, do the same for the basses and then the tenors.
If playback is important, you will need to enter the dynamics as voice-specific dynamics. If the instrument used to playback the choral staves does not use velocity to control dynamics, then you will also need to enable independent voice playback.
When you say “enter the dynamics for the altos”, as far as I can tell, you can only enter 1 set of dynamics per staff. Whether I enter them for either part, and set them above or below, when I try to enter another set for the other part, it just overwrites the first set. Or am I missing something? (Playback doesn’t matter here)
The dynamics entered on a vocal staff appear above the staff by default, but the Placement property can be used to move them below the staff. That is why the dynamics for the down-stem voice should be entered before the dynamics for the up-stem voice. Here is an example using the Choir (reduction) instrument with four sets of lyrics and four sets of dynamics:
As John posted above, the Dorico Manual gives instructions how to assign different dynamics to different voices.
Thank you! Though this link seems to only refer to the existence or possibility of voice-specific dynamics. Why doesn’t it seem Dorico links such topics to a “how to”? I’m going to continue my search, now that I know this seems to exist.
The Dorico manual uses the present participle of verb to link to “how to” descriptions; this is a Steinberg standard for their User Guides. “Enabling Independent Voice Playback” is one of the links available from the initial, informative article in the manual.
lol! Wha? Ok, I’m not actually interested in playback. I’m only interested in how to write different dynamics for different voices. I’m trying to pull together Google searched, other forum posts here, videos. I haven’t found a clear explanation yet. I’m trying to invoke the caret in the current voice, then shift+D, but I can’t get that to work.
I wonder – is it not possible to add dynamics this way if there are already notes in the score? Do you have to enter the notes at the same time as the dynamics? When I follow the instruction for “method 1” here, I get nothing. I invoke the caret for voice 1 of notes already in my score, I click shift+D, I type “<“ for supposedly creating a hairpin cresc., then I press alt+enter. Then nothing appears in terms of added dynamics. What am I missing? Or am I going about this totally wrong?
It would be helpful to have a link to only the how-to for this specific issue underneath the article linked above. That single link should ideally go here:
One thing I’d certainly never do is asking any LLM for advice about Dorico… 
I really like this, John. It’s beautiful. I would love to know how to do it. I hear you about the order of entering things. But is there a special process for entering dynamics that are voice-specific? I haven’t been able to nail that down yet.
Check the link I provided 2 posts up to the actual solution above, sometimes it’s hard to tell the trees from the forest….
On the desktop versions of Dorico, you can input voice-specific dynamics when using either the popover or the panel. Therefore, the link needs to go to somewhere where it’s easy to find out information about both methods.
Other links are present because they are relevant to other things mentioned on the page, like extra staves or the Dynamics editor.
I did a massive prune of related links a couple of years ago, to streamline the amount of choice offered at the end of every page. But at the same time, for every user who asks for fewer links, there are users who ask for more… so I try to balance the two conflicting requests 
Since you are not interested in playback, you do not need to use voice-specific dynamics.
After entering the notes and lyrics in the example I gave in post #4, I selected the tied notes in the upper staff and pressed U to cut the ties. Then I selected the first two measures in the upper staff and typed Shift+D f>p Return. With the dynamics selected, I set the Placement property to Below. Next, I selected the first two measures in the upper staff again and typed Shift+D p<f Return. Finally, I selected the notes in the second measure and pressed T to tie them to the notes in the third measure again.
I used the same procedure to add the dynamics for the basses and then the tenors.
Hi there, could you direct me to where the specific information is about adding multiple simultaneous dynamics in a single staff? I still can’t find it.
Ok, I’m starting to get this to work. Is it true that for some reason, Dorico doesn’t allow you to use this procedure with “just” a hairpin – like you have to use start and end specific dynamics like p or of? I can get it to work as long as I have a starting and ending dynamic.
You are correct that this procedure doesn’t work with “just” a hairpin, but you can enter an immediate dynamic before the hairpin and then delete that dynamic:
In this example, I selected all of the notes except the last eighth notes, entered > into the dynamics popover and set the Placement property to Below. Then I selected the same notes, entered p< into the dynamics popover, and deleted the immediate dynamic.
