Unnecessary key signatures added to percussion score when alternating pitched and unpitched

Dorico
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Please pardon the duplicate post from 6 months ago, but I’m a bit shocked to not be able to find an answer to this (maybe I’m just setting up this percussion player incorrectly?). I’m hoping someone on the Steinberg team can help here.

I have a fairly simple percussion setup: A single player alternating between pitched (vibes/crotales) and unpitched (triangle) on a 5 line staff. I set this up in Dorico by setting the triangle to use a 5 line staff, so there’s no staff changes when the instruments change.

Problem: Dorico is adding a new time signature every time the player switches from unpitched back to pitched. This happens sometimes every measure (see example below), so this is obviously unnecessary and messy. I can’t figure out any way to remove them. There’s no option to hide the key signature in properties or Engraving settings, and I can’t even scale it (the key signature seems attached to the instrument change label, and changes are only affecting the label).

The only workable solution I’ve seen, as suggested in my previous post, is to input the triangle part into the crotales instrument and do all the instrument change / noteheads manually. But this is obviously hacky.

I’d think this would be a very common contemporary percusion setup. Am I doing something wrong here?

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  1. I agree that in this case the repeated key signatures are unnecessary (or at least quite distracting).
  2. I can only guess that this case is so rare that it has not made its way to the top of the production list yet.

(Just as a sidenote, I would go for a different note head for the Crotales to even more differentiate them from the Vibraphone…)

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Depending on how important playback is to you, an alternative workaround (but possibly no less hacky) could be to create a new pitched instrument (e.g. by copying the crotales) and calling that Triangle. You’d still have to manually change the noteheads and suppress playback, but you can do that in one go once all the notes are entered. That’ll get rid of the key signatures, while still giving you a separate Triangle staff in Galley view. You’ll also have more flexibility regarding what staff position the Triangle notes should go.

If you also need playback, you could add a separate Triangle player, copy the notes from the “fake” Triangle staff into that one and eventually hide it from the full score (print) layout.

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Oh that’s a good suggestion. Not overly concerned with a perfect playback solution (I think we’re all used to ideal engraving and ideal playback not always being in agreement).

Still hacky, but I’d put it 1 level lower on the “Hackiness Scale” :grin:

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