Barlines across staff groups

In order to make it easier to find a particular instrument within a score, barlines can extend across instrumental and staff groups.

Barlines across 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 automatically 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 Pro 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.

Custom barline groups

You can create custom barline joins and bracket groups by manually arranging your players into groups. 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 put a single player in its own player group so they appear separately, for example, to separate the soloist from the remainder of the ensemble in a concerto.

You can also input custom barline joins to determine the staves across which individual barlines extend.