Sub-bracket instruments in same family

Dorico
1

I must be missing something.

I have 2 flutes, 2 oboes, and then a clarinet and a bass clarinet, then 2 bassoons.

I would like there to be a sub-bracket for my two clarinets, since they are the same family of instruments.

As it is, all of my woodwinds are perfectly bracketed together, and sub-brackets are applied when both staves of a pair are necessary (and absent when the two staves are condensed.)

However, I find myself having to manually add a sub-bracket for my two clarinets, and this has a bunch of annoying little glitches. It tends to break brackets elsewhere in the score and do weird stuff. (for example, when I get everything right, then add a sub-bracket to my clarinets on page 1, it suddenly breaks the full bracket that connects my 2nd bassoon to the other woodwinds, on page 5. It’s frustrating having to go through the score correcting this type of error. and every time I correct an error it only creates new ones. So there’s obviously some sort of glitch with the “insert sub-brackets” feature.)

Is there a setting in Dorico somewhere that will automatically bracket family instruments together?

2

No, there’s no setting for this at the moment: Dorico will only show sub-brackets automatically for identical instruments, not for instruments in the same sub-family – Dorico doesn’t really have a sense of the groupings of e.g. clarinets, flutes, bassoons etc. within the wind family.

3

Hmmm, definitely should be on the wishlist for a next version then. It’s required in many cases.

2 Likes
4

The real question is why is one manual bracket change causing problems elsewhere in the score?

Might be worth posting some examples of that. If they got fixed, then this wouldn’t be an issue.

5

I struggled with this for a while until I understood how it works. You should be able to change the bracketing once on the first system and leave it that way – but you have to have all staves showing (at least temporarily) on that first system. Then, when any staves are hidden, the bracketing still applies to the groups as you set them.

6

so remove condensing of staves, and remove hiding of empty staves?
then re-apply those once my bracket has been added?

7

Exactly.