User manual

Instruments in Dorico Elements
In Dorico Elements, an instrument is an individual musical instrument, such as a piano, a ute, or
a violin.
Dorico Elements has a database of information about properties of each instrument. These
include the playable range, common and uncommon playing techniques, notational conventions,
transposition properties, tunings, clef, number of staves, type of staff, and so on.
RELATED LINKS
Instruments on page 82
Players in Dorico Elements
In Dorico Elements, a player can represent an individual musician or several musicians.
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Solo players are individual musicians who can play one or more instruments, for example,
a clarinettist who doubles on alto saxophone or a percussionist who plays bass drum,
clash cymbals, and triangle.
●
Section players represent multiple musicians who all play the same instrument, for
example, a violin section player can represent eight desks of musicians, or a soprano
section player can represent the whole soprano section in a mixed voice choir.
NOTE
Section players cannot double instruments, but they can play divisi. This means that they can be
divided into smaller units, which is commonly required for strings.
Groups in Dorico Elements
A group represents a collection of musicians that are considered together, such as a choir,
orchestra, or a chamber ensemble.
In a typical project, there might be only one group that contains all of the dened players, but
you can dene as many groups as required to allow easy separation of forces in larger-scale
works. It might also be necessary to assign players to these groups for the purposes of, among
other things, properly bracketing and labelling their staves in the conductor's score.
EXAMPLE
A work for double choir and organ can dene the two choirs as separate groups. This allows each
choir to have its own label in addition to the labels for each sectional player (soprano, alto, tenor,
bass) within the choir.
In a complex work, such as Elliott Carter's “A Symphony of Three Orchestras”, each of the
orchestras can be dened as a separate group.
Flows in Dorico Elements
Flows are separate spans of music that are completely independent in musical content, for
example, a song, a movement in a sonata or symphony, a number in a stage musical, or a short
scale or sight-reading exercise of only a few bars in length. A single project can contain one or
more ows.
Each ow can contain music for any combination of players. For example, brass players are often
tacet in the second movements of Classical-period symphonies, so you can simply remove brass
players from the ow for the second movement. In a set of cues for a movie, for example,
specic players might not be required in some cues, so the corresponding ows can contain only
those players who have anything to play.
Dorico Elements concepts
Key musical concepts
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