Solo below gli altri in staff divisi?

Dorico
1

Hello all,

Is something like this possible, natively within Dorico?

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There are instances of John Williams using this in some of his scores where there is a solo contrabass line that appears below the gli altri.

Is it possible to change the position of Solo and gli altri from the “Change Divisi” dialog without renaming them? This is useful for keeping playback of the solo instrument on a solo VST without too much workaround.

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Thank you!

2

I suppose, with cutaway score capabilities, one could add a solo Player below the gli altri and reveal it only when needed, but this would circumvent the programmed divisi approach.

3

I would like to avoid circumventing the programmed divisi approach.

So is it currently not possible to move the order of solo and gli altri staves?

4

You could just create a normal divisi and change the names…

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3 Likes
5

Thanks for your reply Janus. This may be the best course of action for right now.

My client is looking for something a little more immediate that doesn’t make use of workarounds and makes use of the solo player and gli altri.

However, I understand this is quite a fringe use case, albeit one that I think could and should be implemented into the software at some point.

6

Beyond editing the staff labels, it is not really a workaround at all. From a notation perspective there is no difference. And Dorico has never respected the solo for playback in divisi (you have to use independent voice routing and dedicate one voice to the solo, which is definitely a workaround, but one that will work equally well in your case)

3 Likes
7

Janus is right, solo divisi are not handled well even if the solo is on the top staff. It’s also worth nothing that the new cutaway feature does not work on divisi staves. So to get a result like your example at the moment you will need to use a separate staff.

8

Thanks for this idea, @Janus . I didn’t originally want the “solo” staff to end up below the “gli altri” staff, but this does solve my problem in a practical way.

What I did was split the soloist and the section players onto two string staves (Dorico Pro 6.1, NotePerformer) and enabled Independent Voice Playback on those staves. Then I routed the upper “Solo” staff to a solo instrument sound and the lower staff to the section sound.

However, when I use Restore Unison, only the upper staff remains, now played by the whole section — but in Dorico it still seems to be routed to the NotePerformer solo sound.

Ideally, I’d keep the solo staff on top and simply switch it back to the section sound, but at the moment I’m not sure what the correct way to do that is. So from a workflow perspective, moving the solo staff below the section is a reasonable workaround.

If anyone has a good suggestion for how, in my situation, I can get the section sound back on the upper staff, I’d love to hear it.

9

You just need to “reserve” one voice for the Solo. So when the section becomes the solo you change the voice. And when it returns to the section you change the voice back too.

(Edit: This also allows you to have both a solo line and section sharing the same staff, if you want it!)

5 Likes
10

Thanks, @Janus, for the guidance — this is the method I’m going to adopt.