I want to know how others approach organizing the instruments on their scores. I have done mainly small ensembles in the past. ... Right now I'm working on an orchestration for full symphony orchestra + jazz combo + several other instruments not normally in an orchestral score. I set this up as usual, with each instrument having its own staff. I did that so I could easily do an extraction where each player gets his or her own music without any confusing divisi bits. As a musician, I absolutely abhor those combined parts, and I vow never to put any other musicians through that unless the divisi is a very small percentage of the part.
As somebody else pointed out, there are two different issues here. Combined parts on orchestral score staves is virtually universal practice because single staves for 35-50 parts is impractical. I completely agree with you, however, RE the advisability of totally separate extracted parts, and I require this of all composers and editors who submit material to me.
In the score, I would strongly suggest that only identical instruments share a staff. The common practice of, for example, combining tuba and bass trombone on one staff is not, IMO, a good idea.
Sometimes it may be preferable to give a player their own staff in the score even though other instruments of the same type are also present. This would be done when the two parts are so different that they would tangle up with each other visually.
... As I understand the standard Finale extraction, the best Finale will do is extract a part with all three trumpets on the same staff. It looks like TGTools Smart Explosion could then split that combined trumpet part into three separate staffs. And then I could do another Finale extraction to break that apart into three separate trumpet parts. Is that correct? And is that the best way to accomplish the task?
Yes and yes.
Is there any way to avoid that extra editing/extraction step?
No, but it should be fairly painless if you prepare properly. See below.
And if I go the two-step approach with TGTools, would I be smart to enter each trumpet part to a separate layer, or is that not really necessary?
It's not necessary, but you need to be strict in your procedure. If there are two parts on a staff, and some passages have only one line of music, that line must *always* be marked either 1. solo, 2. solo, or a2 so that TGTools knows what to do with it. Wherever the second parts crosses above the first, that must be indicated either by using layers, with opposed stemming, or by writing :
2. 1.
like that. BTW, these are good practices even without considering TGTools at all. A good score contains *all* the information needed to produce a performance of the piece according to the composer's desires.
That said, I enter the notes on multi-instrument staves just as if it were a keyboard staff: homophonic passages are entered as chords in one layer, brief polyphonic excursions are done with Voice 1 & 2, and true counterpoint is done with layers. TGTools is very good at sorting all this out properly, and even Finale's own explosion algorithm ain't half bad.
OK, now for bonus points. I already have this humungous score with everything on its own staff. Is there a good way to go about combining the family-related staves? I can use the piano reduction plug-in. That might work OK as long as all the parts are moving together (vertically), but with moving voices, it seems like I really need each voice to go to its own layer, otherwise the TGTools Smart Explosion may never put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Use Finale's regular Implode Music utility. Or try this: edit each part the way you will want it to look when combined with other parts on one staff (incl. all stem directions, etc.), then *drag one staff on top of the other.* This is an old Finale trick that was essential for certain effects in Finale 2.X and earler, but it's still worth remembering.
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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