Dorico: creating divisi and unis sections
It is not uncommon for there to be cases when there are two players on a part, that they play both in unison and later divide into parts. You can simulate this in Finale by just have two parts and marking the unis. and div. sections yourself.
But Dorico makes this a lot easier and takes care of the annotations for you. Let’s consider the cello parts in this piece by Sullivan. They start out playing entirely different notes pizzicato and soon join together. They have another short divided section later on in the piece as well.
While the conductor’s score may show these on a single line,
the players would prefer them separated.
But there is a more automatic way provided in Dorico. Let’s see how it works.
You have to start with two staves with the two parts separated. Then, let’s create a new staff that will handle the divisi and unis sections. You have to create a staff called a Section Player instead of an Individual Player for this to work.
In Setup Mode, go to the icons at the bottom of the left side Players panel and click on the Add Section Player button:
Note that the new Section Player staff is indicated by there being two little people icons in Players title.
Next, go to Write mode, and copy the top part into the new Section Player staff:
Also, delete the manually added “Unis.” text. Now, we want to mark the section where the divisi will occur. First select the first note in the Section Player staff. Right click on it and select Staff->Change divisi. This will bring up a box you indicate how many divsions there will be:
Click on the Add Section division button. This will create divisions 1 and 2. Click on OK, and a new empty staff will be added to the cello section player staff:
Now, copy the Cello 2 line where it exists, here through measure 8:
Then, to end the divisi section, select the first note on the upper line where divisi no longer occurs, and right click and select Staff/Restore union:
This ends the divisi section. Now, in this piece, there are a few more divisi measures starting at measure 59:
Click on the first note of measure 59 and select Staff/Change Divisi. Add a section as before. This makes the second staff visible. Paste in the second line.
Paste in the second line, and then select the first note or rest of the measure where the divisi ends and right click as before, and select Staff/Restore unison.
The second staff disappears for the rest of the piece.
The ViolinCello part now looks like this:
But looks a lot better after moving measure 7 and 8 to the first system:
Finally, we should go to Setup and delete the scratch Cello lines we used and leave only the section player line.
Then, the beginning of the full score looks like this:
Or, with the layout set to condense divis, it looks like this:
