Yes, I completely agree! This is often quite the opposite of what is needed for a drum set in a jazz context. Sure, when writing for a middle school band, you’ll need to depict everything with notation. For college and professional bands, there is often little or no actual drum notation and everything is conveyed with text, slashes, and cues.
For example, here’s most of the first page of a drum part I wrote in December:
There is no actual drum notation, just text, slashes, and cues, yet it was performed perfectly by a professional drummer with no further input from me, and recorded virtually by everyone individually with no rehearsals. Here’s the YouTube video for anyone interested.
All that notation is very standard and can be found in virtually any drum part, yet is impossible in a percussion staff in Dorico because the rests can’t be easily edited in the bars with 1-bar repeats. Before someone chimes in not to use 1-bar repeats if it isn’t really the same, this is very standard drum set notation, where you use 1-bar repeats to indicate that the basic pattern or groove is the same, and then the drummer can play off the hits as they choose. So I’m left with repurposing another non-percussion instrument to notate for drum set.
Yup, that’s pretty much what my charts look like. The one bar repeats (with cues) are also useful because most notation programs will give you a repeat count (like the (8) right before rehearsal “E”) making it easier for the drummer to keep track of the bars.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but as a feature request I’d really love to have the option to show the repeat count on only the last bar of a series of 1-bar repeats, rather than having to always edit the Count Frequency property settings. On drum parts I always use it as you mentioned so the drummer doesn’t have to count, so it would be nice if Dorico could do this automatically.
And - of course “multimeasure play”. Mark e. g. 13 bars, select the “multimeasure play” functionality and the 13 bars are replaced with one bar with an editable label “Play 13”. Oh how much time this would save me, and how many drummers who would be happy about less page turns <3
You can set the Alpha Channel to 0 to make the 1-bar repeat and count invisible and then add your own text. Here the 3 is the default, and the “Play 12” I did with text and Alpha Channel 0.
Yeah, it would be great if they provided a few more options with this. The default way of course, but text above staff, text in staff with Erase background pre-selected, text below staff, text with wavy lines in staff, etc.
It’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that this is impossible in a percussion staff. It absolutely is possible, if you’re prepared to use a separate instrument purely for rhythmic cues. Rhythmic cues work nicely (with a couple of Engraving Options tweaks) and you don’t need to be able to edit the rests.
You could, for instance, build your kit part in a layout that looks like this:
There isn’t a benefit to doing it like this unless you want to actually hear hits in Dorico playback, but I can’t imagine that it’s much slower than doing everything on one staff, moving rests and scaling stuff down manually.
That said, here’s a feature request from me: I’d really like an option to force stems up on rhythmic cues. Where the only other thing present is a repeat region (e.g. bar 6) I currently have to cheat.
Drum set “cues” aren’t like normal cues. They need to appear in the parts and score as the conductor needs to know exactly what is written in the part. I’m not gonna waste rehearsal time yelling at a drummer for missing something if I have no idea if it’s actually in their part or not. Is there a way to do that? I didn’t see an option under Layout Options/Players/Cues, just a global “Show cues” which I certainly don’t want.
Thanks for explaining.
In a layout that globally has cues turned off, you can’t turn individual cues on.
In a layout that globally has cues turned on, you can Select All, Edit > Filter > Cues, then set the Hide property (locally), then select a cue signpost on the kit stave, Select More, then turn the Hide property off.
This doesn’t feel particularly logical to me. Perhaps there’s a separate feature request in there, for the Cue “Hide” property to be a general Hide/Show override rather than a one-way “Hide”.
While possible, this does seem a lot more time consuming than simply using a non-percussion staff. Adding another staff, inputting into that staff, creating cues, turning off all the other cues in the score feels like a lot more work than simply entering the “cues” in the right place and moving on.
Just a couple examples from scores currently laying on my desk, that I didn’t work on:
Nestico - Complete Arranger (was teaching Nestico in class yesterday)
Just thought of another issue with using drum set “cues” too. They are often simplified to remove extraneous information that the drummer doesn’t need to see. In this score to Jimmy Heath’s Longravity, the 16ths in the saxophones are unnecessary for the drummer to see as they shouldn’t be played on the drums. Mr. Heath just puts the important hits from the saxes that he wants the drummer to play, which then goes right into the note from the trombones.
That in itself isn’t a problem if you have a dedicated cues staff, as above. You write into it directly rather than cueing into it. For that matter, if you then go through and remove some bar rests you can build in in such a way that the Cue into the drum staff is a single Cue running from bar 1 right through to the end of the Flow.
For what it’s worth, I’m not suggesting that I don’t agree that there’s a need for some better way of doing it. I’d be surprised if it turned out to be some way of quickly making things cue sized and putting everything above the stave in one fell swoop, though, seeing as the rhythmic cue functionality already does that. That said, there’s a big overlap between what Lines and Playing Techniques can do, so maybe I should stop hypothesising!
Often (not always) the drum cues aren’t cue-sized, but full-sized notes. The Nestico example above is cue-sized, but all the others I posted are full-sized. Since Cue size is a global setting, is there an easy way to scale cues for one staff? Or just Properties/Custom Scale to scale each cue back up to size?
Thanks all, this became a very informative thread. I will go through it and make tests in some days, it appears very promising! And yes preset drum cue note size is on my wishlist - however I would like to be able to configure them without touching other things such as “normal cues”, other drum parts, expressions etc. So yes I agree with @FredGUnn that they should be configureable with a little better granularity than “all cue notes in the project”.
@pianoleo I have a follow-up question: if you use a single line percussion instrument as source for the cues, how can you get the cues in the right position? I have started experimenting with this and this is what I see now:
I would like the cues in bass clef b // treble clef g position…
