We have different arrangements of our repertoire depending on what budget the customer has. So we’ll do either a duo, quartet, or quintet. This means I have multiple arrangements for the exact same song.
I would normally copy one of the arrangements, rename the file, and re-do the arrangement for the ensemble I want.
It occurred to me that I could just have different groups of players for each ensemble type and have the song form be exactly the same. This allows me to create a new arrangement with very little scaffolding and be less error prone.
Off the top of my head, I think the only problem would be the ‘group name’ appearing in score layouts. But that can be avoided by using part layouts for the various arrangement scores.
(Personally I still use separate files for each different arangement - but perhaps I should think differently)
So, I’ve worked a bit on this and exporting the parts is kind of a pain to be honest. You can drag and reorder the instruments in Print mode so that you can group them together by arrangement, but you still get into things like “is this the Viola part por the duo, quartet, or quintet?”
They should already be this way be default. If not, you’d want to arrange them thus in the Layout panel in Setup mode.
Another thing you can do is modify your Page Template to use staff labels rather than the Layout Name. This way you can rename the layouts to avoid confusion.
Ooh, this is interesting. I didn’t know about this. This seems to be the way to go. It does force me to create two different page template sets; one for scores and one for parts which I don’t particularly like for these arrangements, but otherwise is exactly what I want so it’s a small price to pay. And, I do that anyway for orchestral stuff so no big deal.
