Improvements to Working With Instrumental Parts in Dorico | Getting Started with Dorico 2

🎬  This article is a transcription of one of the excellent tutorial videos 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 “Working with Instrumental Parts in Dorico Pro 2″…


Hello, I’m Anthony Hughes, and in this video I shall be showing some of the new features added to Dorico 2 that make working with instrumental parts easier and more flexible, in the advanced music notation software from Steinberg.

Propagate properties

One powerful aspect of Dorico’s layouts features is the ability to easily have different properties set on the same events in the full score and instrumental parts. In this example I am showing the same passage of violin music in the full score layout and the violin part.

However, sometimes it’s useful to make these changes to properties across all layouts that the player is assigned.

This is now possible in Dorico by making a selection in the layout that has the properties set that you wish to use everywhere,

This works in both directions: Conform properties to the score or to a part.

opening the Edit menu and choosing Propagate Properties.

It works in both directions, so if I Undo that last change and now select the part layout, the properties are carried over to the full score.

Which properties are propagated depends on the mode you are in: using the command in Write mode only sets the properties available in Write mode.

Dorico slur properties in Write Mode

This means you can safely use the feature without worrying about things like offsets you made to slurs etc. in Engrave mode.

Dorico slur properties in Engrave Mode

If you want to use the feature to set properties such as slur-relative positions and so on, do so from Engrave mode.

Propagate part formatting (01:38)

Another time-saver is the ability to copy the formatting of one layout to another.

In Setup mode, right-click the layout you wish to copy the formatting from, and choose Propagate Part Formatting.

Choose the layout or layouts that you wish to copy the formatting to, and press OK.

Things like System and Frame Breaks are set in the destination layouts, but…

Update: Note the addition of “Include layout options” and “Include system formatting” in the Propagate Part formatting dialog. This functionality was added after the video tutorial was created.

…you can also use it to match many layout options, such as page size, space size, the default master page set and so on.

Create default part layouts (02:13)

If you ever find you have mistakenly deleted some of the generated instrumental layouts in your project, you can now use a new command in the Setup menu to create those default part layouts for all that are missing.

Instrument names at beginning of flow (02:28)

There is a new Layout Option on the Players page, at the bottom of the Instrument Changes section that allows you to Show Instrument Change labels at the start of flows.

Layout Options… > Players > Inst. Changes >

This helps greatly with players holding more than one instrument, but where staff labels are set to not show. Now there’s no excuse for them playing the wrong instrument at the beginning of a flow.

Tacet al fine (02:52)

We’ve added a new Engraving Option to the Multi-bar rests section of the Rests page that sets a threshold for the number of bars rest you can have at the end of a flow before it starts showing as a tacet al fine.

H-bar width (03:09)

And the multi-bar rest H-bar can now be set to a fixed width,

which you can, of course, specify.

… I’m Anthony Hughes, thanks for watching.



TRANSLATIONS
Verbesserungen bei der Arbeit mit Einzelstimmen in Dorico | Einführung in Dorico 2

I very much hope you’ve found this video transcription to be helpful. If you have, please subscribe to OF NOTE and follow me on for ongoing music notation news and info. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Dorico YouTube channel to see many more excellent tutorial videos like this one. ~robert puff

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