Time for a change in focus.
I managed to put all The Nutcracker Ballet together, except for the ‘Final Waltz and Apotheosis’, which I cannot seem to find in digital form at all. Putting it all together was a huge effort (over twenty parts total), and I will have to decide if I want to omit the final part or enter it in by hand. I am a bit weary of all that work, but the little bit that is left I will save for next Christmas season, where I will make CD audio gift giveaways of the whole production. It’s huge and fits on two CD’s.
To clear the air and my mind a bit, I went looking for symphony something that would not take long to create a rendering of. I found Beethoven’s Symphony No 1 in C Major online. It did not sound all that bad in MuseScore, with its improved audio engine, but I knew I could improve upon it in Dorico.
This piece was already condensed, which is acceptable, although I prefer a non-condensed score. My reasoning for this is that there are tradeoffs involved with condensed scores. These tradeoffs come with plusses and minuses. For play back, there is usually no need to create individual parts for each individual player of a particular type of instrument, (assuming your sampler will play that instrument polyphonically). However, it has no way of dealing with unison parts that were notated singly.
Dorico lets you notate individual players separately and condensing them onto a single staff is for display purposes only. In this way, even though a part is singly notated on a condensed staff, it is played in unison by the players for that part. I chose to leave it already condensed – it is a lot of work to detangle a condensed score. I cleaned up the score a bit as it did have a few errors in xml translation although there is still plenty of objectional stuff, and I made a nice title page for it as well.