I’ve got a completed score of a piece for flute and piano. I’m looking for advice on the best procedure for beginning to orchestrate the piece, i.e. to expand the accompaniment to chamber orchestra. I’m thinking of one of two methods.
In either case, the idea will be to fill out the orchestration directly in Dorico. (It’s not complicated.)
There will be a piano part in the chamber orchestra. It would be helpful for me to include the existing piano part in the score, though much will be deleted or changed.
One approach would be to just make a copy of the score as it exists, go to Setup Mode, and begin adding players. That would seem to be simplest unless there’s something I’m overlooking.
The other approach would be to start fresh, do stuff in Setup Mode to define the score, and then copy and paste the flute and piano parts in from the first score. I’m afraid there might be a risk of missing something important if I do it that way. E.g. would all the tempo changes be included?
I may have answered my own question, but before I take the plunge I’d like to see a couple of opinions of others with experience.
You don’t even need a new project file, if you don’t want one. You can add all of the new players to the existing project (including a second piano player) and then define your layouts appropriately – for example, you can still have one chamber score layout that includes just the flute part and the original piano part. The advantage to this is that you’re working all in one place; if you make a change or fix a wrong note, you don’t have to go to a second file to fix it there as well.
You can add/change the Setup at any time.
I would start with a copy of your orginal file.
Then I would put the original Flute/Piano players into a group of their own (this will keep them separate on the score as you add new players.
Also you might find the Sketch Instruments useful - you can set up grand staff players for winds/brass/strings (but it all depends on your own process…)
Both of these solutions sound workable. Aaron’s sounds easier and like it makes more sense, especially given that a I’m going through it I’m likely to want to finesse the existing version. For instance, I just went through and added a few breath marks for the flute. Gotta preserve those.
I’m afraid to say that I’m still an arch-beginner when it comes to defining layouts. I realize that this is a powerful aspect of Dorico. In the dozen or less “finished” scores I’ve done my approach has been to to define the players, add the notes and everything else that appears in music, and to let the layout more or less define itself. I might tweak a few things in Engrave Mode until I can say “that looks pretty good” (as long as I’m not publishing for the world, which I’m not).
To define layouts before I even start would assume that I have some sort of clue what I’m seeking to do, which I’m afraid that I don’t. It appears I need to watch some videos and do some studying first.
Defining a layout just means creating the layout and wiring it up to flows and players—it doesn’t mean actually making any Engraving choices. But you could still leave all of this to a later stage and just do your orchestration work in your one “master” score layout that contains everything.
