Hello everyone!
I hope you’re doing great. I’ve tried looking for this in the forums, with no success. I’m trying to hide one staff from a multi-staff instrument. Please take a look:
As you can see, the player “Keyboard” plays multiple instruments. So far, so good. For reference, you can see how I’ve hidden the lower “Coro Gospel” staff with no problem.
Here’s what happens when I go to Manual Staff Visibility:
Apparently it’s not showing my piano staves, but my player’s? I’ve tried hiding that, but the 2 staves go away. What am I missing? Please help.
In the very last section of Layout Options, in Vertical Spacing > Staff Visibility, there is a switch “Allow individual staves of multi-staff instruments to be hidden”. (Note that this operates per layout.) Does this address the need?
It doesn’t, unfortunately. You can tell that it’s already allowing that by looking at the “Coro Gospel” (Gsp.) which is a multi staff part with one staff hidden.
I believe there is a limitation with staff visibility and instrument changes. It works fine with the Coro Gospel since that is the only instrument that Player holds.
So is it not possible to hide a single staff from, say, a marimba part when the player also has other instruments? This is the problem I’m having. The empty marimba staves won’t get hidden. I have no chord symbols but I do have instrument changes.
I didn’t realize this! I often have marimba doubling vibes, glockenspiel, etc., and because marimba parts commonly fluctuate between grand staff and single staff I realize this will be a big problem.
Is the solution therefore to add an additional single-staff marimba instrument to the player and then manually copy any passages requiring only one staff to the single staff instrument? Will this not then show an instrument “change” from marimba to marimba?
See if you cannot make manual staff changes to eliminate the additional staff when not needed. You may also have to specify in Layout Options that grand staff instruments can delete a single staff.
Of course, considering what Daniel has said, this is likely a pipe dream on my part. I don’t have time to play with it tonight.
You might also consider putting the marimba in a separate player but combing the marimba player and the other mallet instruments in the same Layout with judicious use of hiding unused staves.
You should certainly be able to use two marimba instruments held by the same player, but you will indeed see instrument change warnings/labels appear at the transitions between the two instruments. They’re all hide-able in Engrave mode.
That’s going to be really tricky, because as soon as you hide any staves belonging to either instrument, you’ll no longer be able to show instrument changes. The way to go might be to add an additional piano or celesta instrument that has a single staff, and have that held by the player as well, then switch to that instrument when needed. The downside of that, of course, is that you’ll then have only a single staff in the part as well.
