I cannot seem to get the tempo marking to display above the bottom staff in the example attached. I believe this has something to do with with how the guitar is categorized. It would be really nice to be able to simply specify where you want system objects to appear (better yet, have the option to change this for individual objects). This is easy to do in Finale for example. In the meantime, can I get around this without having to type all tempo markings as text? I’m using Dorico 4 Pro.
System text only appears above certain staves in a “Full” score, and although these can be indicated in Layout Options, they generally only appear on the top staff of an instrument group (woodwinds, brass, strings, etc.).
At least that is the current practice.
To reproduce the tempo marking manually on the lower guitar, use regular SHIFT + X text with a paragraph style that matches tempo text.
This really only works with “traditional” scores though. I’m running into a situation with a current large project where there are both pit musicians and stage musicians. Dorico’s method doesn’t really work well when like instruments may be split up into different groupings in the score. The ability to customize control over placement of system objects like Finale can would be very helpful.
Yes, as someone who has worked with Finale since it first appeared, I would love to see something similar to Finale’s Score Lists in Dorico when the Team revisits this area.
Hi there,
Is this problem solved with the newest Dorico 5 ? I have to write a score for a recording session with overdubs, and i’d like my tempo to be shown both above my “basic” strings section and my overdub strings in the full score.
In theory, it should be possible to obtain what you want by creating a new instrument family for the overdub strings using the method described in this post. In practice, I have almost never succeeded in getting system objects to appear above the first bracket for a custom instrument family, and the last time I did succeed was sufficiently long ago that I don’t remember how I did it. All my recent attempts have failed.
Indeed, something broke in relation to this functionality (after I think Dorico 5.1.0). I discovered this method with Dorico 5.1.0 and it worked.
Today I installed again 5.1.0 (parallel installation to the current 5.1.70) and the method described in the mentioned post of mine of December 2023 still works in 5.1.0 (see the last screenshot). It is a pity that it doesn’t work anymore in the recent version (5.1.70).
I would be interested to know if this change was intentional, or is there something that I missed, @dspreadbury? Thank you for any advice.
here the different result from Dorico 5.1.0 vs Dorico 5.1.70: in the latest Dorico, the system objects only displays on the top of system bracket, instead of displaying also above the first bracket of the “duplicated” instrument family, as desirably displayed in Dorico 5.1.0):
(I noticed that the instruments in setup, are assigned to both families: Brass and brass2, and maybe this is not 100% logic and unmistakable to let Dorico know which instruments/families are intended when we choose them in layout Options > System Objects. Nevertheless this method worked in 5.1.0 and was very comfortable…)
This method was a huge relief for me, to get System Objects above every staff in a multi-piano score. It worked on 5.1.81, but I did have one occasion when I had to switch out of Setup into Write mode to get the System Objects to appear correctly.
This thread is quite old now, because Dorico 6 has been out for some weeks… and you have now all the granularity to define where the system-attached objects should be displayed, as per the Version History :
