I have a Lead Vocal instrument in which I have added staves above and/or below a few times. Now that I don’t need them anymore, I have removed them.
For some reason, the extra staves are still listed in the Manual Staff Visibility dialog. It’s no biggie, but is there a reason and is there a way to remove them from the list entirely?
Old staves.dorico (1.2 MB)
I messed with the file for a while, and the extra staves seem to be a permanent part of the instrument. I was able to make them go away only by adding a new Voice instrument to the player and deleting the 4-staff one.
Hi Mark. I appreciate you taking the time to have a look - thanks.
Once extra staves have been created for an instrument, they remain part of the instrument forever. At the moment, there’s no way to get rid of them, but it’s something that we are thinking about for future versions. In the meantime, the recommended approach would be to add a new player with a new instrument, copy the material across from the old instrument with unwanted extra staves to the new one, then delete the old one. We know that’s a lot of busy work. Alternatively, just ignore the fact that they’re listed in the Manual Staff Visibility dialog.
Sounds good to me. I was just wondering, that’s all.
One last question: if I remove an unused extra staff, is there a way to reuse that staff if I do want an extra staff in the future?
I believe if you add an extra staff on the same side of the main staff, and a staff exists but isn’t currently visible, Dorico will be smart enough to show it rather than create a new one.
Yes, that’s been my experience. And I note that it even works backwards: If I’ve added a staff (above/below) later in the piece, and then I do the same Add Staff command at an earlier point, Dorico is smart enough to use the same staff. (This obviates the later +1 Staff signpost, which I suppose could cause confusion, but I’m glad it works this way.)
I just experimented again, and confirmed that added staves are per-flow. So another way get rid of them would be to make a new flow (not duplicate, of course) and copy everything from the old flow.