🎬 This article is a transcription of one of the excellent video tutorials posted to the official Dorico YouTube channel.
Presented here in written form with the kind permission of its creator, Anthony Hughes, this tutorial is titled “How to Use Groups to Ensure the Correct Numbering in Your Ensemble in Dorico”…
Hi, my name is Anthony Hughes. I am going to show you how to use player groups to ensure the correct instrument numbering in your score, using Steinberg’s new music notation software, Dorico.
I have a project here that I’ve set up with a standard 4-part choir.
I want to make this an 8-part choir, so I’m going to be working with the Players panel here in Setup mode.
I’m going to start by right-clicking on this Soprano player card and choosing Duplicate Player, and that’s going to create another Soprano for me.
You’ll see that Dorico has automatically numbered these two players Soprano 1 and 2 .
I’ll do the same with the other three players, so that I now have 2 altos, 2 tenors and 2 basses as well. And now I have my 8-part choir, all properly numbered and ready to start adding some notes.
Now, if I decide that I actually need this project to be for “Double Choir”, rather than 8-part choir, then I’m not going to want the individual players to be numbered.
So I’m going to select this first Soprano player and then, holding down Ctrl on Windows, (Cmd on Mac), I’m going to click this first Alto, Tenor and Bass.
Now if I come down to the bottom of the Players panel, to this row of buttons, which we call the Action bar for the panel, then I press this button here to “Add Group”.
What you’ll see happen is that these players are now arranged together and because they are in a separate group, they are no longer being automatically numbered with the other players.
I’m going to double-click this group header and rename it “Choir 1”. And then I’m going to do the same with the other choir. This time, I can select the Soprano, then hold down the Shift key and select the Bass and that selects all those four players.
And I’ll just rename this one to Choir 2.
And that’s it; the music has updated to show the two separate choirs, each with their own bracket and numbering.
I hope this has been helpful. Please subscribe to the Dorico YouTube channel to see more videos like this. I’m Anthony Hughes, thanks so much for watching.
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This is truly awesome and incredibly helpful – thanks so much.