Specialized Staff/Staves: 2-, 3-, 4-line staff?

[jamag]

Seems like this ought to be straightforward, but I haven’t figured out a way to make a 2-line, 3-line, or 4-line staff. Maybe my use case is too narrow (elementary school teacher), though, Dorico does provide Orff instrument assignments within their setup tab, which is pretty specific to elementary instruction.

I’ve tried making an unpitched percussion kit but the kit presentation type that would seem to apply, the grid type, doesn’t allow space notes, as far as I can tell.

May I suggest the option to “turn off” the visibility of individual lines?

[dspreadbury]

It’s not currently possible to create a pitched staff with a variable number of staff lines. It can be done for unpitched percussion instruments by arranging them into a grid, but I don’t know whether that would be acceptable for you? With a percussion grid, you can only write notes on the staff lines, rather than positioning them at arbitrary distances above or below the staff lines like you can on a pitched staff. But if all you’re trying to denote is e.g. high vs. low then possibly this will work acceptably.

We do plan to introduce a means to change the number of staff lines for a staff in a future version, but I can’t say right now when this will be.

[Coe]

Please, make it possible to have 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-line staff as soon as possible in Dorico.
Thanks.

[Romanos]

Daniel just mentioned today that the ability to define custom instruments won’t be in 4.0 but will likely come in one of the subsequent (free) “dot” updates. This wasn’t promised, but he acknowledged that it is a high priority.

Waterphone

We are certainly planning on adding features to allow you to edit existing instrument definitions and to define your own, but unfortunately this will not be part of the next major version, at least not its initial release. It’s really a very significant amount of work given the richness of the data Dorico holds about instruments, so it’s something that will require a concerted effort to achieve.

[McJg]

I don’t mean to be controversial. I just want to share some feedback about dorico.
As contemporary composition’s student, the hard way to modify staff lines is the main reason why almost all of my conservatory colleagues and teachers refuses to move to dorico and still prefer to use the old softwares. I’m now the only one in the composition course that actually use dorico.

Just to let you know!

Hope this feature will be available soon, but I can understand the amount of work

[Romanos]

There is no doubt this will come in due time. Even if it’s nothing more than a generic “4 line staff” or “1 line staff” that you have to re-name yourself.

[Derrek]

It seems as if customizing staves would come around the same time as the instrument-designer option since they seem logically related in some cases.

[lorenzopagliei]

I am in the same situation as @McJg’s colleagues. Dorico is a wonderful piece of software that improves tremendously with each new release.
Changing the number of lines (and their spacing) of an instrument’s staff over the course of a score is a common practice in contemporary music scores (and not only).
This is one of the main reasons why I do not permanently switch to Dorico.