When dealing with orchestral percussion, it’s often common to write percussion kits on 5-line staves, with instruments mapped to pitches. This is beautifully achieved in Dorico. However, I’m not sure how to obtain an automatic “To” indication when changing instruments.
2 Scenarios are typical:
1)There could be a passage where Percussion 1 is playing Piatti, then a few bars of rest, and the player goes to Snare Drum. This is achievable in Dorico by inputting a manual text “To Piatti” and then a manual label “Snare Drum”
2)One of the Percussion players goes to a Mallet instrument. This is currently tricky: If you add, for example, a Vibraphone to a percussion player, Dorico handles “To Vibraphone” and “Vibraphone” labels perfectly, but if you go back to the Percussion kit, it’ll write “To Percussion”, which does not help the player know where they should go. In addition, there is no easy provision to hide that generic change, because instrument changes and labels have no hide property: you have to go to Engrave, activate the custom text property, and input a space.
Does anyone have a good workflow for this?
AFAIK, a drum kit is typically played by one player (a drummer), it’s not meant for a group of percussionists changing from one orchestral instrument to another.
The easy answer would be: “This is not designed to do what you want it to do, but you can override all labels in Engrave mode. So ‘to percussion’ could become ‘to snare drum’.”
The more complicated version would be: You could try putting some of your percussion instruments in their own kit (or simply displaying them as 5-line-staff) and handing them to the same player. Then you would get the correct “to ” labels, but this would also mean that you can’t have them together at the same time on the same staff - if this was necessary.
Just checked and one thing that I hadn’t noticed, somehow, is that “To” labels can be overridden too. That solves it, because it’s as simple as specifying the instrument name there.
Doing multiple 5-staff instruments is also a clear solution, but it has the drawback of cluttering Galley Mode. It’s true that we now have filters, but a kit is still more convenient.
Thanks for the pointer!