I’m starting an arranging project and wondering the best way to work in Dorico. It’s for a small ensemble live performance with a rock band, and consists of 10 songs. The instrumentation will be the same for all 10.
In MuseScore I would create separate scores for each tune and organize the files through Finder on Mac, but is it better to use Flows in Dorico? I’m new to Dorico and the concept of Flows vs separate files.
I’ve looked around and have watched some videos, but would love some experienced input. Have heard of issues with computer performance degradation as files get bigger.
What is your best practice for organizing a project like this?
Separate files with the same template that then get combined into one project at the end as multiple flows, or just do them all in one file as separate flows?
This is certainly the sort of thing that Dorico’s flows are intended for. The beauty of having all the pieces in one document is that you can have effortless consistency of page numbers, margins, engraving options, text styles, etc, etc, etc. And if you need to change anything, you just do it once.
And of course, you can have one flow starting on the same page as the previous one ends.
I see absolutely no reason to start with separate files. You can always export every flow as a separate document later, if there’s any reason to do that. (Though, if you just wanted a ‘single’ Flow, you could add another Layout with just that Flow.)
Remember that if you import a Flow from one document to another, you’re just importing the notation of that Flow. You don’t import the layout. You’ll keep things like manual position changes to notation, but not to Staff Spacing.
That tends to be large orchestral works, with over 40 Players, with many hundreds of bars.
I’ve created one project of over 600 Flows (all piano, and only 14 bars each! It only got slow after about 500 or so.
If one writes/arranges the numbers in random order as inspiration strikes and intends to move them into final position later, then do not try to format the music until the flows are in final order. Since much formatting stay with the page rather than the music, saving final clean-up till the end saves a lot of re-doing.
I tried working on separate song and then combining them later, mostly due to the original music being imported from separate files in Finale, and I found a lot of instrument duplication due to small inconsistencies in the Finale files. When starting from scratch in Dorico, I would use flows and create as much as possible in a single file.
If I now decided to work on individual songs in separate files (for whatever reason), I would probably add a few extra measures to the composite Dorico file and then split them off as a flow to export in the hopes that doing this would create identical instruments to ease reintegrating the flow into the composite program later.