8-String Guitar / Grand Staff Guitar + Tab

Hello - I recently got an 8-string electric guitar and want to transcribe some things in Dorico. I’d like to use a grand staff with a tablature staff.

Since you can’t make new instruments in Dorico (right?), I’ve adapted the ‘Hawaiian 8-string guitar’, which I don’t think I’ll ever use, and turned it into an 8-string electric with two extra bass strings (B and F#).

In the screenshots below, you can see first what I’m after (which I just made with separate piano and guitar instruments as an example), and second what I’m currently getting if I use notation+tab on the guitar after adding an extra staff.

Is there a way to achieve this notation while using a single guitar instrument (i.e. no piano + guitar workaround)?

I couldn’t work it out from the manual nor online searches…

Cheers!
ps there is no celtic harp in Dorico?

Target:

Current result:

I usually use 8va markings for the lower range stuff.

However, this would be a great feature for extended range fretted instruments.

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I recently made a feature request for something similar, here. For now though, workarounds it is I’m afraid.

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okeydokey - very weird that Dorico creates two tab staves when you add a second staff to the ‘normal’ notation as in my second shot above, unless I didn’t follow a procedure correctly. I haven’t got it to work since first posting, still.

At least it’s quite easy to create an 8-string guitar instrument with whatever tuning one fancies, even if you still can’t create new instruments as such.

Well, it’s not something that the application supports. We didn’t anticipate the requirement of showing a single tablature staff for a grand staff instrument, so it’s not something we have explicitly catered for.

it is a bit niche to be fair. It would be very useful in future versions - aside from extended range guitars becoming more popular I could imagine such a feature would be useful for other tablature instruments or transcription tasks.

Agreed that this is niche, but +1 from me, please.

This is how I notate my 7-string electric guitar compositions (condensed grand staff plus tablature beneath it). Currently I have to work around this using two instruments (one for the grand staff and one for the tab), which isn’t the smoothest workflow.