I am a brand new Dorico user in my 30 day trial period seriously considering ditching Sibelius for Dorico. I mostly write for marching band and indoor percussion and we do a lot of mallet percussion writing where cymbal rolls and hits are written onto the 5-line mallet staff, like this:
I was never able to successfully get this to sound right in Sibelius (as written above, it played back the rolled note as the mallet instrument which does not sound good!) which is one of the reasons I am thinking of switching. In Dorico, I was able to figure out how to add a separate instrument for the suspended cymbal for my mallet players and I can get the audio to play back correctly, but the score looks very cluttered because Dorico is marking an instrument change and changing the staff to a single line percussion staff for every cymbal roll. Is there any way to tell Dorico to just leave the 5 line staff in place but still play back the cymbal roll sound?
Put the Suspended Cymbal in a Percussion Kit (from the left panel of Setup mode, along with any other unpitched percussion this player is using), then set the representation of the percussion kit to show as a five-line staff (from Layout Options > Players > Percussion).
The instrument changes will show when switching from the pitched instruments (Marimba etc.) to the unpitched Kit, but these can be overridden from the properties panel.
Thanks! I got through setting up the percussion kit and getting it to look like a five line staff and I found the properties panel, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to suppress the instrument change labels. For a brief second, I had an instrument change option in the properties panel and I was able to change the “To Percussion” wording to “Sus” and drag the label over to the top of the sustain cymbal note which is fine. I couldn’t figure out how to delete the To Marimba wording other than just setting the scale to “1” which I assume makes it infinitely small? And I can’t make the clefs disappear at all, so I have a random change to a percussion clef then back to a treble clef. Any way to make all that go away? And now I can’t even find the instrument change option under the Properties panel anymore so I’m not sure how I found that in the first place.
Also, while those changes I made to the 5 lines staff and the instrument change label appear correct in my Full Score, but when I select the individual player part using the dropdown, the Percussion kit score is a 3 line staff again and not the 5 line staff that is displaying on the full score and none of my wording changes are appearing. Why don’t the changes seem to be carrying through to the individual parts?
This gives one the ability to format each layout separately. In your case, this is not what you want, but in other circumstances you may find the flexibility very valuable.
Yes, in Layout Options you can choose which layouts your changes will apply to. These options can be set differently in different layouts so that you can, for example, present a percussion score on multiple single-line staves in the parts, and a more vertically compact five-line staff representation in the full score.
