Dan, my point was that with the method of using solo instruments with additional staves, this is very easy:
but this is nigh-on impossible:
Using a section player with divisi, I can center the instrument name between the stave and it will always remain centered, like so:
Bearing in mind that playback’s not going to be perfect anyway, I can’t see an advantage to using solo instruments with additional staves.
Oh, if only I had 4 horns… 
I’ll add the divisi option to the condensing post. Thanks.
What a great forum this is! Particular thanks to pianoleo for going to so much trouble to explain.
If it would be of any use to anybody, I happen to have created a template for my own personal use that mixes and matches the two methods based on the needs of a fairly common orchestral setup. See pic below for a preview.
For the endgame of part production and condensing and so forth, it’s got three full score layouts: one for the conductor (with the condensed staves), one for the composer (with all parts separate, and where the percussion is grouped as three separate percussion players), and one for the process of combining and moving things around between the two (so this has all individual and condensed players and staves).
Like I said, it mixes and matches the two different methods. So for instance, for four horns, I like the look of Leo’s method, so that’s a divisi. However, for Clarinets, I generally use two clarinets and a bass clarinet, so that’s accomplished by having 3 solo players and 1 section player. The three solo players (2 cl., 1 bass cl.) go in the composer/parts layout, and the section player goes in the conductor score (along with the bass cl. solo player), and the instrument name is edited to show Clarinet in Bb 1/2 (where 1 and 2 are stacked vertically). (Also, for the clarinets, the automatic inclusion of the key in the name is turned off and was input manually; otherwise, the formatting of the numbering gets messed up). The percussion is accomplished by having individual instruments in the full score and kits where I wanted certain instruments on one staff; then the composer/parts score gets three percussion players, each with all their instruments grouped to them. An additional instrument is duplicated for each of these players and named “Percussion” so that if you want it this way, the beginning of the composer/parts layout and the individual player layout shows “Percussion 1,” “Percussion 2,” etc. at the beginning of the piece, then with normal instrument changes later on. This is easily changed if not wanted.
All the instruments are set to adhere to fairly common orchestral standards, so for instance, horns and timpani have no key signatures, keyboard percussion ranges are set to what’s most common, and so on. Strings are set as a system object family. Tempo text font sizes are increased by 5 points. Initial brackets are all sorted out. Etc. etc. etc.
The file is too big to attach to the forum, so here’s a direct link to it.
Download as you please, edit, share, repost, and enjoy.
P.S. I suppose in hindsight, I may not have needed to use section players for the conductor’s layout; I had originally done it so that Dorico wouldn’t automatically renumber things, but by changing the name, that’s irrelevant. Nonetheless I constructed this through a somewhat extended process of trial and error, so that’s the way it was, and I didn’t see the need to change it, though it would be easy enough to do if needed. Then again, it could be useful for adding additional players by creating additional divisi, so it’s probably fine as is. I also could’ve deleted all the additional layouts for the condensed parts, but that also didn’t occur to me at the time, and who knows why or how I or anyone else might end up using the template at some point, so those are all still there.
Hi!
This is great, thank you all!
I can’t get the staff labels to go away, even when I set the layout options to “Show divisi change labels above staves”…
Any idea why this won’t work?
Gosh, nevermind!
Was trying to do this with “Horn” layout selected and not “Full Score” on the right in Setup mode…
Leo, would the new staff label engraving option for centering multiple adjacent identical instrument names (belonging to solo players) between staves be what you’re looking for in this instance? task here
Wow, Lillie! What a way to make a thread redundant 
Thank you - I’d evidently forgotten about that option - and yes, it’s exactly what’s needed in these circumstances.
pianoleo, I thought the same thing about the whole thread, but I kept quiet because I couldn’t remember if that option was actually in 2.2, or new in 2.2.10.
Sorry to come back to this one, but it arose on Facebook again last night. Am I right in thinking that, actually, it’s NOT possible to use the new staff label Engraving Option (above) to label two staves “1.3” and “2.4”? If so, I’ll take back my previous post and leave the workaround here for posterity…
It is correct that you can’t use the new option, because it’s only for solo players. All of these workarounds will be done away with once Dorico has proper support for showing music for multiple players on one staff.
I have two French Horn instrument staves bracketed together in the conventional manor. I simply want the staff label ‘Horns’ to be centered between the two staves and to remain centered if the distance between the two staves changes. I do not want any numbers. Using divisi or extra staves does not create a new instrument that I can assign a VST to, so this is no good…I want a separate midi channel on each stave. Using a piano grand staff and pretending it is a horns staff does not work as you can only assign one VST to both staves. Leo’s post, four posts back says it all, but I am wondering if this is now possible with 3.1? I see the Engrave option: ‘staff labels for identical solo instruments’ option, and this does center the name, but I can’t get rid of the numbers - any ideas?
You can assign different MIDI channels to different voices, which makes one aspect of using a piano staff less problematic if that does everything else you want.
Thanks Derrek, that’s a good idea! It would be nice to have a little more control over staff labels and numbers…Maybe you could select the staff label for a particular staff (currently you can’t select a staff label at all) and be able to override the name in the Properties Panel? That would allow complete flexibility for naming and numbering the staves. Or, in the ‘staff labels for identical instruments’ option in Engrave options, there could be more numbering options. Typically for four horns you would have two per staff of course, therefore numbering the top stave ‘1’ and the bottom stave ‘2’ for identical instruments does not make much sense. Also, sometimes you might have horns 1 & 3 on the top staff of a Horn grand staff, and other times you might have horns 1 & 2 on the top staff. Being able to change the staff labelling easily in Engrave mode would solve this problem.
Thank you to the team for considering this.
Dorico has a condensing feature to automatically handle the disposition of multiple players to a single staff, so you don’t need to manage this stuff manually yourself.
