I know this may sound silly, but I’d like to to show a piano part in treble clef only? I can, of course, use a C-instrument such as a flute, and change it’s name, but for some purposes I’d prefer to show a piano part treble clef only? Is this possible? Is there a treble clef piano part hiding somewhere? Can the bass clef be removed? (I just saw that someone else has asked the same question. Can I be directed to it it there’s a solution?)
–N
Sure, in Write Mode you can right-click on the piano’s lower bass clef staff. From the popup menu that appears, click on “staff”, and then click on “remove staff”.
Thanks, gdball.
You can also simply hide empty staves and “allow single staves of grand staff instruments to be hidden”.
Just be aware these options will not work and it will be impossible to remove the staff if you have selected the option to have chords show between staves:
Sheesh! Can anything so simple be made any harder?
Probably, but making things more difficult would be a poor investment of the Development Team’s time.
I’ve hacked my instruments.xml file to have a single staff Piano available. It’s what I usually start from if I just need a sketch staff. It also is the only way I know to do something like this:
Since it’s impossible to remove a staff from a Piano when showing chords between staves, an easy solution is just to switch to the single staff Piano instrument and back as needed.
Or you could name it rhythm section or something for a pianist, guitarist or bassist to use.
I appreciate the several approaches that have been mentioned in response to my question about making a single piano line. Gdball’s solution is easy for what I’m doing, so it’s the one I’ve been using. I wonder, however, as do others, why in Setup mode the list of “keyboard” instruments doesn’t simply include a treble–only (and maybe a bass–only) choice under the “piano” listing, since this can be useful in composing and in making parts to be handed out.
–N
It’s been requested by myself and others many times. Hopefully we’ll see it in a future version.
Sounds familiar. I’m hoping the next Dorico version, whenever it arrives, will be chock full o’ little features that streamline the workflow. There is that “big list” somewhere so the developers are aware of user’s requests. We need the little stuff so that for some of us, Dorico will be competitive with, for instance, Finale.
That’s great, so how did you switch to the single staff Piano from bar 5 onwards? Cheers
You can either allow Dorico to hide one staff of a grand staff instrument when empty, using the options in the Hide Empty Staves section of the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options, or, if you prefer to have complete control over this yourself, create a manual staff visibility change at the position where you want either staff to appear or disappear.
It’s sort of funny rereading the posts from a couple of years ago, since so much has changed with Dorico since then. One thing that hasn’t changed though is that you still can’t remove Piano staves with a staff visibility change if you have chord symbols set to show between staves. While this still would be nice to be able to do, there are a couple of ways around this. A simple way is to have the Player hold multiple instruments and then switch to a single staff Piano instrument like Sketch/Treble Staff.
In the image below I left the staff labels and instrument change labels as default so you can see where the change occurs.
Obviously I would rename the abbreviated label if used, and would hide the instrument change label by just changing it to a space in Properties in Engrave mode to end up with a Piano part that looked like this:
