Barlines across staff groups

Using default staff groups

When a barline only appears on individual staves, it is much harder to locate individual lines at a glance. However, when barlines continue across instrumental groups in the score, instrument families are shown as blocks, which makes finding an instrument much easier.

Figure: Barlines on individual staves

Figure: Barlines across instrumental groups

Barlines extend across staff groups when they are joined by a bracket. Which staves are included in a bracket depends on the instrumentation and context, but usually staves for instruments from the same family, such as woodwind or strings, are bracketed together.

By default, Dorico brackets staves according to their instrument family. This means that in projects with only a few instruments, barlines do not extend across the whole ensemble, because all the instruments are from different families.

You can change the bracketing style according to the ensemble type in your project on the Brackets and Braces page in Engrave > Engraving Options.

Making custom staff groups

You can also manually arrange your players into groups, which have their own bracket and barline groupings.

If one or more players included in your group were previously in another group, any remaining instruments in their previous group remain grouped.

You can select a single player and add it to its own group in order to have it appear separately, which could be useful for showing a soloist separately from the remainder of the ensemble, such as in a concerto.