Special staves layout with a (harp) solo piece

Hi! I need to edit a harp solo piece, which has the following staff layout:

. voice (changes between 1 and standard 5 lines system)
| harp (r.h. - standard 5-lines)
| harp corpus (1-line)
| harp (l.h. - standard 5-lines)
. additional percussion (changes between 1 and 2 lines)

So the harp player has to play additional percussion instruments and has to sing as well. The pipe in the list above is supposed to show, where the standard accolade is placed. The music is imported from a mxml file.

I currently have a “Voice”, a “1, 2, & 3” (the 3 harp staves) and a “Percussion”, which means 3 players. And I am also thinking about adding another “voice [1 staff]” to the “Voice”-player in order to be able to switch between 1 and 5 lines (from what I understand, Dorico does not yet support different staves designs in 1 voice neither cutaway staves, right?).

But I have a feeling this might not be the way to go… How would you guys solve such a player setup?

That’s quite tricky to achieve at the moment. You probably don’t need separate players, but certainly it would be a good idea to use separate instruments held by the same player, with instrument changes disabled. (Unless you need instrument changes for another player in the same layout, of course, in which case using separate players would indeed be the right thing to do.)

Thank you, @dspreadbury, for your feedback!

Can I ask you for another tip, please: currently all staves of the harp are imported as separate instruments. Is there a way to tell Dorico to combine the 3 harp staves to one instrument – and to actually assign it the “Harp” instrument? If I change only the first of the 3 harp staves via “Change instrument”, a second staff will be added, which is not, what I want. (Unless you tell me that this is the way to go and I have to use copy&paste to move the music around…?)

You can’t select two existing instruments and change them together into a single one, so copy and paste is indeed the way to go.

Ok, thank you. – I prepared that score very carefully in Finale. Is there a reason, why Dorico does not create a harp with 3 staves as shown above, but instead creates a player with 3 instruments?

I’d need to see the MusicXML file to say for sure, but I expect that will ultimately be the reason.

Thank you, @dspreadbury, but I will not rob your valuable time with that!