1) I employed “Change divisi” to turn a double bass ensemble staff into a solo staff. Later, I double-clicked the signpost to change it to two solo instruments, and it broke the bracketing:
Note that the bracketing is screwed up only in Full Score view. If I switch to the part, the bracketing correctly envelops both staves:
2) Although I set the notes of the staff to “Up-stem voice 2” in the Write tab, they are designated “Up-stem voice 3” in the Play tab. Similarly, if I set them to “Up-stem voice 1” in the Write tab, they are “Up-stem voice 2” in the Play tab. (Dorico might be reassigning the voices of the upper staff accordingly, I don’t know.)
3) Try as I might, I am unable to assign the lower staff to a VST. I have tried setting it to a new up-stem voice, I have tried setting it to a new down-stem voice, I have tried making the change in the current flow and in all flows in the Play tab… nothing works. Whenever I select the VST, it snaps to “—”. The upper staff is fine, I can assign the proper VST and channel and it plays perfectly.
You must already have a bracketing change. The bracketing change defines explicitly the staff at the top of the bracket, and the staff at the bottom of the bracket. If you have an explicit bracket and you add another staff below the staff that is explicitly defined as the bottom staff in the bracket, the bracket won’t cover that staff. Either delete the explicit bracketing change (find its signpost at the top of the system) or select the bottom end of the bracket and type Alt+down arrow to change the staff that explicitly defines the bottom of the bracket.
Though you have multiple staves belonging to the same instrument, you have only one track in Play mode that displays the music from all of the staves belonging to the instrument. As such, ‘Up-stem voice 1’ on the left-hand of the piano, for example, will appear as ‘Up-stem voice 3’ in Play mode, because ‘Up-stem voice 1’ has already been used to describe the first up-stem voice on the right-hand staff.
If you’re using Dorico’s own built-in sounds, this problem will be caused by Dorico not yet having loaded a sound for that voice; we’ve fixed this bug in our internal builds so it will make its way into your hands in due course. For the time being you may find that explicitly choosing Play > Load Sounds for Unassigned Instruments allows Dorico to load an extra violin sound for your third voice and allows it to be chosen in the track header.
This (removing and re-establishing the bracketing change) actually solved everything. Bracketing, playback, voice designation, everything. It even cleaned up the count of voices in my double bass staves, eliminating the unused ones.
Sweet. Shouldn’t a staff that goes divisi remain inside the current bracketing range, though? Seems like unexpected behavior to me.
If you’ve bothered to define a bracketing change, the assumption is that you really must mean it. If you then add a divisi, you need to redefine the brackets to include that divisi.
Except that my bracketing change was to instruments in an entirely different section. I’d bracketed my timpani and bass drum; I’d made no change at all to the bracketing of my strings section.
It doesn’t seem intuitive to me that a change to bracketing in one section would affect the bracketing logic of another section.
Because the bracketing change is a global item, it has to apply to all instruments, so even if you only edit one bracket, information for all of the brackets is included in the bracketing change.
Except that my bracketing change was to instruments in an entirely different section. I’d bracketed my timpani and bass drum; I’d made no change at all to the bracketing of my strings section.