Dear community,
I have tried for a while to find a solution to this problem. As far as I understand, cross-staff beaming between kits is not possible, but is there a clever workaround to achieve something like this?
Bottom staff in my example has 6 tomtoms, single line staff is in this example two bongos. I realize that this would also be possible to notate clearly on one staff, but there are other examples where up to 12 instruments are used simultaneously, and I would really like to keep the 6 tomtom in a “clean” tomtoms only staff.
Any ideas?
Welcome to the forum, Magnus. I’m sorry to say that there really isn’t a good way to do this at the moment in Dorico. You can give a non-kit percussion instrument, one that shows just a single line, to the same player as a pitched staff, then you can cross notes from the pitched staff up to the unpitched staff, but unfortunately you can’t then change the playing technique used by the pitched note when it is shown on the unpitched staff, so it will always draw on the line, rather than allowing you to move it above or below the line.
Dorico doesn’t provide any single-line pitched instruments, though it is possible to fool Dorico into making one if you either import one from MusicXML or you hand-hack the file that defines instruments that is included with the program, though I can’t really bring myself to recommend that route. However, in theory, if you had two pitched instruments held by the same player, one using a five-line staff and one using a single line, you would be able to reproduce that example, though of course it would play back pitched rather than as the desired percussion sounds.
If you really must however, you could make something resembling this in a single kit by using all instruments in a grid where the first 5 instruments have their line gaps reduced to 1 in the kit editor, the top line gap increased to 7, and where instruments using spaces instead of lines are done through adding playing techniques. You can also use the group feature in the editor to rename the top and bottom “kits”. Be aware however that the whole thing is understood as a single kit, and key signatures, clefs etc… will appear in the middle of it. Also, forget about playback, but I thought I would still post it here because it might still be useful. 
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Thanks, Daniel and Claude! I am three weeks into using Dorico now, and I absolutely love both the software and this forum!
Playback is not an issue, so I might go for two normal pitched staves, and just give the bongos their designated positions on the upper staff, along with the other extra instruments. It will look like two kits, but I have the flexibility with cross staff beaming.
Or I might also look into Claude’s solution, but with 5+5 lines, so the key signatures and clefs will be sentered.
I don’t quite see why playback will be an issue with your solution, though, Claude?
I’m sure there is a way to make it playback correctly, but I’m no “playback guru” I’m afraid! Still, it’s pretty amazing what this software can do.
+1 for implementing some sort of a solution! I have been searching the forum and talking to dorico experts but it seems there is not even a workaround for the type of thing seen in the foto attached. Percussion instruments with staves in different lines combination and cross-staff. Did I miss something or is there already any sort of workaround? I would love to know the plans for the future regarding this situation!
Thank you everyone!
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I believe for now the only solution is the one you can see here. However it is not the best elegant solution and it has some limitations
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