Is it possible to make an 11-line staff where the middle-C line is dotted?

I was thinking I might like to experiment with notating on a staff like this:

  • 5 lines above
  • one dotted-line
  • 5 lines below

Something like this…

Is such a staff possible in Dorico? Or is there a different way to maybe coax the Grand Staff into something like this?

I have no idea how you’d make one, but there’s an interesting side to your query:. There has actually been music published with an eleven line combined staff, but without the dotted line. (The center line looks like all the others.) VERY hard to read, and I can’t point you to an example at the moment, but I have seen it done.

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There’s no native way to set up a staff like this in Dorico, I’m afraid. It is occasionally requested to show a single-line staff in between the staves of a piano for the purposes of showing percussive elements or other extended performance techniques, but unfortunately there’s no support for this in the software as yet.

To achieve this appearance, you could use three individual instruments, a treble staff, a bass staff, and probably a pitched instrument overridden in the instrument editor to have a single staff line. It won’t be dashed, however. You can then join them with a brace.

All three instruments can be assigned to the same player so you can freely cross notes between them.

But, critically, there will be no correct understanding of what the implied pitches for each staff will be. I guess you could use a hidden alto clef for the single-line instrument, so that the line represents middle C.

It will be a huge faff. Probably OK to print out music that you’ve already prepared, but it would be highly inconvenient to actually compose or write music that way.

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Four months ago, I was asking for an « intavolatura » staff (Frescobaldi), and John Price had found the solution.
I don’t know if this is what you want.

Intavolatura

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I posted a doricolib file to create an 11-line “monster staff” in this thread. I set it up so the middle line was middle C though:

I’m gonna be honest, it’s so uncommon to find G and F clefs defining a space, that I would find yours really hard to read. Those clefs could be created with a doricolib as well if you really want, but not sure how to do the dotted line. Is the dotted line because that line isn’t actually a pitch?

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I appreciate everyone taking me seriously on this. I’ve thought I might be able to use such a staff for sketching and analysis, where I’d have every staff be a uniform concept from the music… foreground, background, etc.

For example, here’s an in-progress reduction of the opening to Elgar’s Enigma variations…

In the “background” staff, I have a lot of staff-crossings from the treble so that I can more easily read exactly how the notes stack up. I thought this kind of 11-line staff might be useful to more quickly make sense of the chords. (very rough drawing)

Looks like my best bet for now, is a drawing program and maybe a pen and paper.

Thanks everyone!

LOL, by the use of “unusual” in the title, I thought you meant the clefs that you posted, as opposed to the other 11-line staff examples that have periodically been posted. I just checked my “monster” staff file and it looks like some update might have broken the clef. I’ll have to look into that later. It would take some trickery, but it might be possible to get the staff correct in Dorico, then just change the middle line to be dashed in Illustrator.

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I’ll update the title to remove “unusual”.
Maybe I could do without the dotted line and just space the staffs closer together. That might bring me closer to what I had in mind…

Edit: Nope, I don’t think that would work because dorico still treats it like two staffs so both staffs get dynamic markings. I think for this to be effective, Dorico would really need to think of it as a single staff…

I would think that’s pretty easy to do already. in Layout Options, just set the distance between staves to be 2 spaces for whatever type of braces or bracket you use …

… and tell Dorico to ignore vertical collisions:

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Good luck in all you do, but I do wonder about the hands crossing if one takes the stems of the lower keyboard at face value. I imagine they have something to do with orchestral sounds, but certainly they are not helpful to determining which hand plays what.

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I’ve find this used in French solfege / theory book such as one by Alain Weber (cannot find original title, it should be “Guide to the Simultaneous Reading of Clefs”) where all the book is written on the “endecalineo” (11-line-staff) and one moves a cut-out piece of paper to train a specific clef.
Brilliant, and very cerebral!
So, in education, there may be use for that.

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Yes, I am just doing it to analyze the piece, not to make a piano reduction to play. So the crossings are just to maintain some semblance of the original instrumentation. Also, that’s what Dorico does when you “reduce” something :laughing: