User manual

Unpitched percussion
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 SE 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 SE 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 and drum sets on page 869
Percussion kit presentation types on page 873
Staff labels for percussion kits on page 798
Dening percussion kits as drum sets on page 119
Inputting notes in percussion kits on page 176
Playing techniques for unpitched percussion instruments on page 875
Showing brackets on noteheads on page 642
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 SE, 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 labeling of instruments.
If instrument changes are enabled on the Players page in Setup > Layout Options, Dorico SE
changes from one instrument to the next, just as it does for pitched instruments.
NOTE
Kit instruments in player cards in the Players panel in Setup mode are colored green, whereas
individual percussion instruments not part of percussion kits are colored the same light blue as
all other instruments.
868
Dorico SE 3.1.10