Quirks with staff labels

Hi!

I have following situation: I have to engrave a symphony. There is one percussion player who has to play several instruments. Vibraphone, kit, Kuhglocken, Gongs
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The percussion kit contains instruments like Bass Drum, several cymbals, Snare Drum, Caxixis, … I use the percussion kit in order to have a 5-line-system all the time (which is mandatory by the composer). BTW the moving from 5- to 1-line systems back and forth all the time would result a lack of clarity.

So I am confused by the labeling of the system:

The percussionist starts with vibraphone – so the staff is called Vib.


As soon the percussion player has to switch to Snare, the staff is called Perc.

When the player has to play Kuhglocken, the staff is called »Kuhglocken« (no kit instrument).
Changing to Bass Drum, the staff again is called Perc.
And so on …

Is there any possibility, e.g. to label it »Perc.« all the time, cause its the PERCussion player who plays Vib, BD, Gong etc? Than it would be consistent and logic.
Or is there any possibility to label the different instruments in the kit? The kit called »Perc.« itself is just a workaround by the engraver, but doesn’t have any impact on the instruments organisation of the percussion player.
Or is there a possibility to change the staff labels in engrave mode manually?

Thanks in advance!

PS: I know that I could label every Instrument as Perc. but thats a confusing method. :wink:

At the moment there’s no automatic way to achieve this, per another thread from today. We anticipate adding a feature to make it possible to use the player name instead of the instrument name for staff labelling in the future, but that’s not something you can easily do for now. What I would suggest is leaving things as they are for now, and then at the conclusion of the input and layout process, change the instrument names for the individual instruments you want to appear as “Perc.” to “Perc.”, or consider adding them into the kit if possible.

I considered starting a new inquiry for this, but decided that the name of the topic fit:

Is there any way to change staff labels for a specific flow? I am beginning the input for an anthology of short excerpts for orchestra, specifically theater orchestra. Each is a separate flow, and each uses a different combination of instruments. If a particular flow uses only one flute, is there any way that its staff label can say simply “Flute” rather than “Flute 1”? Same for any wind or keyboard instrument for which some instrumentations use multiples, others only one. Apologies if I’m missing something super-obvious.

I’ve resigned myself that I will need to have, e.g., a staff for “Violins” (that I can divisi into A, B, C) in addition to Violin I and II, so that I can choose just the ones that are relevant to my flow. But I’m hoping there’s an alternative to having a “Flute” staff in addition to Flute 1 and Flute 2 (and indeed Flute 5, for the orchestrators who like to number a woodwind staff according to the Reed book of which it’s part). That’s a lot of extra staves.

You can’t change the staff labels for an individual instrument in a different flow, I’m afraid. You might be able to assign multiple instruments to the same player (or indeed use different players for different flows). If you have a flute in your project already but don’t want it and the new one to be sequentially numbered, you can make their names distinct by adding a trailing or leading space to one of the flutes’ names.