Hello, I have a piece which will contain 6 flows. These are essentially exercises for the developing band, flute, oboe, saxes, etc. All of the flows except for flow 5 will contain traditional notation for the given instrument, but on Flow 5, it is a rhythm exercise whereby each player will play the same rhythms using sticks or some sort of unpitched instrument. The publisher has requested that for this section (Flow 5) that we go to a single line staff like a traditional non-pitched percussion part, e.g. claves. Is it possible for 5 flows of a piece to use standard 5 line music but in one flow, go to a single line with the rhythms showing on that single line? I can not figure out how to accomplish this.
So here would be the end of music for flow 4 for an oboe part:
then in flow 5 the oboe part would need to look like this:
Of course, I need a score that looks this way as well as individual parts. Thanks for the help.
There are a couple of ways to achieve this. One way would be to add an unpitched percussion instrument to each player (e.g. claves) in Setup mode and use that to write the rhythms for flow 5. Then there’s a couple of things you have to take care of:
Change the players names in Setup mode (make sure to right click and chose Rename players so you can also change the short names) otherwise they’ll be called e.g. “Oboe & Claves”
In Layout options>Staves and systems, check Show player name instead of instrument name for all players.
In Layout options>Players>Instrument changes, make sure instrument change labels are hidden in all layouts. If you need the labels because you have any actual instrument changes elsewhere in the piece, you’ll have to hide the change labels caused by the claves manually in Engrave mode. Or, alternatively, actually use the labels to show the change to an unpitched percussion instrument, in which case you could give each player the actual unpitched instrument they’ll be playing.
In this kind of very common situations when dealing with educational documents, I would love to have the option of just selecting any number of measures and, with a simple right-click, select an option like “One-line staff”, or something like that.
A fast way of changing the Style of Staff at any point in the document.
Maybe not quite what you are asking, but, meanwhile, if you don’t want to work in Galley view, you can stay in Page view and using Move to Staff Above/Below, in conjunction with Instrument Changes, can simulate this behaviour. You can move notes or, if you need empty bars, you can use chord symbol regions. With some shortcuts, it is relatively fast to set what you need. Is also possible to record macros to reduce further the steps needed [see the post below]. You can then hide the Chord Symbol Regions, and to make the instrument changes invisible you can tweak their Paragraph Styles. In the example below there are also a couple of tweaks in Instrument Definition for 1-line staff (invisible clef), Engraving Options>Barlines (to have the 1-line staff barline as high as the 5-staff one), Engraving Options>Spacing Gaps (to avoid the gap where the invisible clef change occurs), and some Layout Options for the instrument changes. If you save the file as Project Template, then you have all ready to use.
And here an example with recorded macro and two shortcuts: one for the 5-lines staff, and one for the 1-line staff (using the setup and methods explained in my previous post). The video is recorded in realtime:
then in flow 5 the oboe part would need to look like this:
Of course, I need a score that looks this way as well as individual parts. Thanks for the help.
