I have created a drum kit made up of conga drums. I’d like the top instrument to always have stems down when played without the other drums. I modified the drum kit to have stems down for that instrument and also changed Notation Options > Percussion > Voicing for drum set kit presentation to “Use single voice”.
With all of that setup, the stems are still up.
Is there any way to achieve this, by default, in Dorico, or should I manually flip each note whose stem needs to be pointed down? My sample project is attached. What I’m hoping to achieve would look like this:
Unfortunately you can’t set different values for the Voicing for drum set kit presentation option for different kits within the same project, and you’ll need to choose Use voicing defined in kit editor and specify that both instruments in the Okónkolo kit are set to use a down-stem voice. This might require you to then change all of the other kits in your project such that all of the components are in a single up-stem voice. When Dorico shows all of the notes in a single voice, it shows them all in a single up-stem voice, which can then show stems up or down following the natural rules for staff position.
What is even more strange is if I turn on voice colors…I see various colors for each of the parts except for the iyá (which was configured the same was at the other two drum kits)
Here we are with the Notation Options reset to factory defaults and I modified each player to not have the “Drum Kit” box checked. The stem directions are getting better; now I just need to group the notes together where appropriate (see the itotele part, bar 2 beat 1) and remove all the extra rests.
As things stand there’s no way to remove rests on drum sets. If you don’t want the rests, you need to go back to the method of having everything in one voice. I can’t quite fathom why you’re having to flip stem directions but it may be that that’s necessary.