User manual

The term “unpitched percussion” covers all percussion instruments that are not tuned to specic
pitches. This includes instruments such as bass drum, guiro, maracas, cymbals, and shakers.
Dorico Elements provides comprehensive support for unpitched percussion notation, with
exible options for combining music for multiple instruments into percussion kits that can then
be displayed differently in different layouts. You can also dene percussion kits as drum sets,
which changes the default stem directions of notes.
The different percussion kit presentation types in Dorico Elements are layout-specic, meaning
you can present percussion kits in different ways in different layouts. For example, you could
present a percussion kit as a ve-line staff in the full score layout but with single-line instruments
in the percussion part layout.
You can also customize and create new playing technique-specic noteheads for unpitched
percussion. This allows you to indicate how notes are played by using different noteheads for
different playing techniques on each instrument in percussion kits.
RELATED LINKS
Percussion kits on page 765
Dening percussion kits as drum sets on page 91
Inputting notes in percussion kits on page 142
Percussion kits vs. individual percussion instruments on page 764
Percussion kit presentation types on page 770
Playing techniques for unpitched percussion instruments on page 772
Staff labels for percussion kits on page 674
Percussion kits vs. individual percussion instruments
Percussion kits allow you to show multiple unpitched percussion instruments held by a single
player at the same time in different ways. Multiple percussion instruments not combined into kits
are shown on a single line that only shows the instrument currently being played by default.
One common type of percussion kit is a drum set. A drum set consists of a number of separate
instruments mounted together on a frame, and is typically written on a regular ve-line staff.
Each instrument has its own position on the staff, and sometimes its own notehead type.
Similarly, a pair of bongos is a percussion kit by default in Dorico Elements, consisting of the two
bongo drums, typically written on a grid with two lines: the smaller drum shown on the top line,
and the larger drum shown on the bottom line.
Showing individual percussion instruments separately can be appropriate if a player only has one
or two percussion instruments. However, combining percussion instruments into a kit gives you
more exibility over the presentation of music, which you can vary in each layout independently.
Kits also give you greater control over the labelling of instruments.
If instrument changes are enabled on the Players page in Setup > Layout Options, Dorico
Elements changes from one instrument to the next, just as it does for pitched instruments.
Unpitched percussion
764