I need to notate a ballade for someone declaiming a text with piano accompaniment. The declamation is in strict rhythm, and I’d like to have a 1-line staff with lyrics, with dynamics above the staff and perhaps x-noteheads. What’s the best way of setting this up?
You can add lyrics to any instrument, including 1-line unpitched percussion. In this case, then you go and Edit Playing Techniques for this instrument, you can also set the default notehead to X. The only thing this will not do is behave like a vocal staff w.r.t. dynamics; best option is to filter those at the end, then set the placement to “Above”.
Thanks. I guess what confused me was that I tried to change an existing staff to unpitched percussion by changing the instrument in setup mode, but there were no unpitched percussion instruments available. I ended up having to create a new player and delete the old.
When choosing x-noteheads, I usually just select the entire section or part and use the contextual menu. Do you do this differently?
That works fine too, but when the notehead for the “Default” playing technique is already an X, you can skip this step when inputting the notes. Click on the instrument (not the player) in Setup mode, choose “Edit Percussion Playing Techniques”, then select “X Noteheads” from the dropdown menu, click OK.
Sorry, but I can’t find any item ‘Edit Percussion Playing Techniques’ when clicking the instrument in Setup mode.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. If you hover over the instrument name, a little arrow should appear to the right. Left-click (not right-click) on that to get a contextual menu where you should find “Edit Percussion Playing Techniques”. On any instrument other than unpitched percussion, the option will be greyed out.
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Got it. Thank you!