Greetings from a new user migrating from Finale.
I’m about to begin a new songbook project and I hope it’s ok to ask here about the best way to get started?
This is a fairly large project consisting of 106 compositions which will primarily be presented in lead sheet style. There will be a few exceptions where piano staff will be needed as well as the occasional horn parts too (trumpet, sax, trombone).
I will be getting the files as Musicxml from the composer exported from Finale.
All this leads me to asking, should I set up an empty Dorico project with all the potential players to import into? Is it common practice to use “voice” as the melody instrument for the lead sheet versions? I’m assuming I can do this in a single Dorico file with each flow representing each individual composition?
As an aside, I have a background in publishing, be it outdated. Back then I was using Finale and I would have approached this sort project by having each composition be an individual Finale file which would be exported as postscript (eps) to be placed and paginated using InDesign. My (basic) understanding of Dorico informs me that I could achieve all this within Dorico itself?
I think I’ve already asked too many questions, thanks in advance for any insight before I begin this adventure.
I do, I think… it’s just in my template already, renamed, with a sax sound…
If you only want certain Players (e.g. Trumpet) in certain Flows, you can still have all Flows assigned to one Layout and those Players will only be displayed in the Flows that they are assigned to… hopefully that isn’t too confusing!
You could also have separate Layouts for Flows with a particular combination of Players.
I’m not sure it’s completely cut and dried that you should definitely use a single project with all of the songs contained within as single flows.
If the layout of the book is going to be very regular, with nothing much in the way of unusual layout (e.g. critical commentary, blocks of lyrics, graphics inserted, etc.), then I would agree that using a single project will be a good way to go.
However, if the book is going to have many complex page layouts with lots of bespoke touches for each song – again, I’m thinking here about things like extra blocks of text, illustrations, footnotes, music examples that show alternative versions, etc. – then I would recommend using a separate project for each piece.
The reason for this is that once you have a large number of flows, if you find yourself late in the project needing to make page layout changes or, for example, re-order the songs, you’ll have a bunch of fiddly work to do, because individual page adjustments are keyed off the page index in the project, rather than being associated with specific flows. So if you reorder flows, you’ll then find that the page overrides associated with that flow don’t move automatically to the new location of the flow, and you’ll need to manually move those overrides in Engrave mode.
@dan_kreider could likely give you some great advice too, since he produces (beautifully designed) hymnals and the like using individual Dorico files imported into InDesign, if I recall correctly.
This is the most important comment in the thread. I’m still suffering with a score that I arranged as flows (I really should separate them out) that has ALOT of text blocks in each song.
And since I haven’t griped about it in a while… please fix this.
Thank you so much! This is exactly what I needed to know as the layout will definitely be fluid at the early stages. Would there be any advantage of combining all into one document at the end when the layout order has been finalized? I appreciate your insight, thank you.
Hi Daniel, I personally hope that there can be an option to carry the page overrides along with the flows and its relative pagination. This way when there is any layout/notation change that caused pagination change (more or less pages), I don’t have to manually review and adjust those page template and flow heading change. I think this way make more sense instead of hard keyed to specific page index. I know it’s better to make those page adjustment at the very last steps, but sometimes things just change though.
I tried to do a hymnal project with 530 flows in total 580 pages for purely the score content (Not recommended to go this way, the operation will be slowed down, but it’s workable). For final book composition with all other contents like preface, table of contents, indexes…, I think it’s better to use Acrobat, InDesign or Publisher for the job. Dorico can do the book typesetting work to a certain level, for projects with simpler and more consistent layouts it might be sufficient. But it’s not designed to accomplish complex DTP tasks for the moment.
Perhaps, but you would need to recreate any custom page layouts once you combine the projects, since when you import music from one project to another, you can only import the musical content, and things like custom text and graphics frames or local adjustments to page layouts cannot be imported.
If you are planning on exporting the music into ID (as PDF), then the need for doing it all in one project is reduced. The advantage of a multi-flow project file is for things like page numbers, page design and consistent engraving style. (Also for cases where you want to run the flows on the same page.)
However, it 's easy enough to get consistent options and page templates in Dorico, using the Library manager, page templates and project templates.
If you plan things out in advance, you can certainly reduce the amount of manual work that’s required for the music, whether or not you finish off the pages in another app.
I like to have all of my flows in one project. I usually prepare the flows as single projects without much layout work. Once I know the order of the flows, I combine them into one project without having to change the flows often.
I would like to see more options for music and text frames to have more flexibility when working with many flows. I’ve already expressed some of my wishes in previous posts, so I won’t repeat them here.