Thank you so much fur your kindness! I think I found my workaround, in simply choosing grid instead of 5 lines both in the full score and the parts. Since each of the two percussion players only has a grid with 3 instruments, in my opinion it looks much clearer like that, and like that I automatically have the name of each instrument at the beginning of each line. I know percussionists apparently prefer 5 lines, but I will ask the players directly after they received the parts whether they want me to change the parts to a 5-lines system. I understood now that the percussion legend doesn’t work as I thought, I thought I could just select the whole part and choose legend for the whole part at once and Dorico will automatically put it everywhere there is a change of instrument. Such a function would be very practical, but I don’t think it exists?
But like that I can wait what the playersd say before I do the tedious work of clicking on every first note after an instrument change .
I assume the preference for 5 lines is especially for percussion parts with a big arsenal of different instruments. With my choice of only a few different instruments, I think that looks very clear and simple to follow, what do you think?
As to the box in the lefthand top corner with a loist of the instruments in the parts, I’m still not sure I understand your procedure. But I guess I can simply add a text frame and write in the instruments manually, that’s not a lot of work .
But, one more question if I may: In the setup for the percussion kit, I told Dorico to have the stems of the triangle part upwards. But they are still downwards. It would look much better if they were upwards. What am I missing and how do I change this? See screenshots:
Grid notation is a relatively recent invention, for when you have complex gestures involving multiple instruments at the same time, especially in a custom setup which doesn’t resemble a standard drum kit. But you don’t tend to see it outside of modernist/contemporary scores, and for a symphonic part like this it’s horribly space-inefficient. A 1-line part with instrument changes will do just fine here. And 5-line is also never wrong, though maybe a bit old-fashioned. As long as you define each instrument at its first entrance, it’s still a viable option. Yes, even with only a few instruments.
And now I just discovered my next problem: I just found out that after combining the instruments into a kit, ALL dynamics in my 40-minutes score disappear and i have to enter them anew. I’m sorry, but this makes now sense at all - I’m a huge fan of Dorico, but it seems to me that the percussion functions need some improvement .
I give up. I’ll simply leave each instrument on asingle-line stave and hide all empty staves. As @hrnbouma suggested. My percussion parts are not very complex and the players never have to handle two instruments at the same time. I hope this will be fine. I’m getting too annoyed here
OMG, such a simple solution to all my troubles, THANK YOU!!! I actually had tried as you suggested but it seemed not to have any effect either. But now I understood that I had simply changed the appearance of the kit to show each instrument in a seperate system, but I had to completely remove all instruments from the kit. Fantastic, now the instrument name is shown each time the player has to change instrument, so I need not bother with this anymore.
So for future projects, I’ll simply not touch this kit function at all. To think how much time and annoyance I could have spared if I never tried it in the first place!
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