I’m not sure what to do, but here’s my workflow currently:
Write the piece completely. Get it to a final edit state. I don’t want it to change.
Copy/Paste the voices into the rehearsal part
Realize I want to tweak something, change the choir part
Change the rehearsal part.
Repeat step 3-4 until complete.
(Sometimes) forget to do step 5. If so, pass immediately to step 7.
Repeat step 2-4
I’d love it if there’s a way to create reductions that automatically change when I change a note in the part, ergo: cues but for the choir part. Any ideas or strategies of avoiding the headache I inevitably fall into in this workflow?
I’m not sure why I would have choir parts separate from the score. I use the same parts both in the full (and working) scores and in the piano/vocal reduction. It’s all one working score with separate layouts.
I’m confused… Why would you need “cues in the choir part” if it’s an a capella piece? Isn’t the choir the only thing in the score? Am I missing something?
I’m talking about a choir reduction in a piano staff for accompanists who can’t read open score, and I’m wondering if I can utilize the cue tool to automatically update what appears in the reduction, or am I stuck with the aforementioned workflow?
There seem to be some drawbacks, especially preventing the tenor and bass cue lines (with their different clefs) from canceling each other out in the accompaniment.
I filter, copy and paste, for example, to the piano reduction as follows:
Notes only Soprano to up stem voice 1 treble clef piano
Notes only Alto to down stem voice 1 treble clef piano
Notes only Tenor to up stem voice 1 bass clef piano
Notes only Bass/Baritone to down stem voice 1 bass clef piano
After each filter and paste, I adjust horizontally each voice in case there were preceding rests
Select all in piano part
Open Properties panel at bottom of screen,
suppress playback
set note size to cue
I’ve tried to record a script of this but have not been successful. Being able to fully script in Dorico would allow one to build these actions into a single script (macro) that would eliminate all the busy work. Maybe someone else can do that.
I think it was @Janus who shared with me a year or so ago about using the Cue note process. If you anticipate making a number of changes in the voice parts, use of Cues would probably be best because it will autoupdate the corresponding note in your reduction. At the time, I was very new to Dorico and it just turned out to be easier for me to do the process above than use Cue notes but that’s just my weird brain…
In Layout Options > Players > Cues, the option Show cues was activated. In Notation Options > Rests > Rests in Additional Voices, Bar rests in cues was set to Omit bar rests. The following settings were changed in Engraving Options > Cues:
Under Design, Cue note scale factor to 1
Under Included Notations, Lyrics to Exclude from cues
Under Clefs, Clef at the start of the cue to Use clef of destination instrument
In each cue, the property Start text was activated. The property Voice direction was set to Force stems up for Soprano and Tenor, and set to Force stems down for Alto and Bass. The property Octave shift was set to -1 for Tenor only.
As nice as it is to have an automatic reduction, Piano parts usually** have various alterations from a strict reduction, to make it easier for the pianist to read. These include stemming notes of the same duration together into chords. Where notes cross over (e.g. Alto below Tenor) they are swapped back into ‘height order’ (unless it introduces consecutives, depending on how you feel about that in a keyboard part).
And there may be impossible stretches that need some thought.
Personally, if I need to change notes in the singers, it’s fairly quick to make the same change in the part at the same time, unless I’m re-writing large chunks.
There’s an argument that showing all the voicings is just as, if not more, useful/important; though of course the actual parts are displayed above.
** I’m increasingly wary of saying “usually” about anything, as invariably someone will supply examples to the contrary. But this has certainly been my experience in both reading scores and in creating them. (My first job for Chester Novello was sent back, saying that I hadn’t done the reduction correctly…!)
With Dorico’s playback capabilities, a reduction can always be left until a last or next-to-last step of document prep so that subsequent changes would be minor if necessary at all.
In regard to stems and the like for piano reductions, perhaps there are other schools of thought on that. I prefer the reduction to have the same stem direction as these reductions are seldom used as accompaniments. I saw it both ways here in the US when an undergrad. I learned to read open score several decades ago so I do not necessarily prefer them for myself. For engraving work, I do what the publisher requires.
