3rd Stave for sustained bass notes (piano)
If this has already been done, please direct me?
I tried to transcribe a piece I wrote for piano into
MuseScore. There is one passage of 2-3 measures
where an octave bass note is sustained for those
3 measures while the 2 hands play something else
above that(both hands in treble clef).
The piece is mainly a 2-stave piano score,
but for those 3 measures it needs a third stave below
to show the (tied) bass notes (this is common in
commercial printed music).
I have not found any way to do this is MS..is there?
Thanks,
Phil D'
Comments
Yes. Go to the instruments window (by pressing "I"), then select staff 2 and click "add below". Then, to hide the measures you don't want to see, right click on it and choose Measure Properties. At the top, scroll to staff 3 and uncheck "visible."
In reply to Yes. Go to the instruments by musiclover007
Or, after adding the third staff and entering notes where you need them, go to Style->Edit General Style and turn on "Hide Empty Staves".
BTW, you are aware that it is normally not necessary to use a third staff just to have sustained bass notes in piano music, and that notating things this way is *exceedingly* rare? The usual way to do it would be simply using multiple Voices within the bass clef staff.
And to Marc - pleased to meet you - I've read your book and
found the add-ins you've written for MS are just what I'd been
wanting as well..
re: 3rd stave being unusual : well, here, 4 voices played by the
hands are all in high treble clef - pretty difficult to read
if all 4 on one staff, or (worse) if 2 of them had to be in bass clef
( *lots* of ledger lines above bass clef).
I tried both methods.
Marc's way : Style/Edit General Style/Hide empty staves.
I checked this box, clicked "Apply", and the measures were still there.
Thought perhaps they disappear when you print the score, so I saved it as
a PDF. Still there.
2nd method( musiclover's ): I selected a range of measures ( from beginning of piece up to the
measure before the added bass notes). Then right-clicked, chose Measure Properties,
chose the 3rd stave, and unchecked "Visible", and clicked "apply".
It did not respect the range, but just deleted the last measure I selected.
So, I repeated the process for every staff on that page. This worked, but:
1. left the vertical line joining the top 2 staves to the added one( which I could not delete..), and
2. left the space occupied by the 3rd staff.
Am I making a wrong turn somewhere, or leaving out a step?
Anyway, your advice is appreciated!
Thanks,
In reply to Sorry, can't make this work! by msphild
Hard to say more without seeing the actual score. Hide empty staves should work if you create e third staff as a separate instrument, but not if you create it as a third staff within the same instrument used for the first two staves. Any staff that consists of nothing but empty measures for the entire system will disappear for the duration of that system. It is how, for instance, I created this: http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/scores/21717. The second staff is a separate instrument from the first, but it is empty on most of the systems, so it went away when I turned on Hide Empty Staves.
Marc, that was the right direction - I was adding another staff in the same instrument
(in this case piano) below the bass staff.
So the next time I added a contrabass instrument to the score.
And this failed. It didn't even add a ( visible ) staff to the score at all.
I tried beginning a new score, with piano ( 2 staves ) and contrabass ( below it ).
This worked. I could add bass notes to some of the measures, and editing the
general style to hide empty staves hid them ( as long as they were on a separate
system ).
So it appears that I cannot add a new staff to a completed piece?
I would have to create a new score with 3 staves, and copy & paste the
original into it.
Thanks again for your help...
In reply to Another attempt ... by msphild
You *can* add an empty staff to a completed piece - but you won't see it if you have Hide Empty Staves turned on :-)
That was it, Marc...Thank you for
"looking over my shoulder"!
You have a lot of patience!
Phil
In reply to You got it! by msphild
I also remember having made that exact same mistake more than once! :-)
I just wanted to say I found this discussion by searching on 'add third stave to piano score'. To describe three-stave piano music as "exceptionally rare" is a tad dismissive. Piano composers often use three staves for clarity when the going gets a bit virtuosic: you'll find examples all over Liszt and Rachmaninov. It would be nice to have a simple 3-stave option for piano parts, and I can't imagine this is too difficult to include.
In reply to This really needs to be looked at in MS 2.0 by FrankO
Not sure what additional support you'd need. Adding a third staff is already quite easy, as is using the hide empty staves option. Is there a particular use case you feel is not covered?
In reply to Not sure what additional by Marc Sabatella
Hi Marc,
The third staff in a piano score is typically added to clarify complicated musical leaping around — which is not always necessarily technically challenging. For example, it allows cross-hands music to be written without endless clef changes (see sample attached). It facilitates reading for the player: in my sample I'd prefer to put the present top staff in the middle, with the higher left-hand chords in a new staff above.
The logical way to create a stretch of 3-staff piano music is to use "Add above" or "Add below" in the instrument menu. However, the added staff is not automatically bracketed with the other two, and "hide empty staves" doesn't remove the extra staff when just that one is empty; the software seems to treat all three as a single stave in the context of that command.
I can create a third staff by adding another instrument (a stringed instrument works fine) as musiclover007 suggested. And now "hide empty staves" works fine. But once again I have to rebracket the staves by hand. These are work-rounds, and they do the job, but it would be nicer if MuseScore covered the situation without a work-round. BTW, I notice that an organ stave presents similar problems. Adding an organ produces a three-staff system but hide empty staves only works when all three staves are empty. Surely there's acres of organ music without the pedals involved which needs the pedal staff to vanish temporarily?
In reply to Hide empty staves doesn't do it by FrankO
I don't see this as a "workaround" at all. What you are describing is a kind of special case sitatuion, and MuseScore provides tools to handle it. Why should there a single magic command to shortcut the few extra seconds it takes to handle this case? You must rewalize there are hundreds of other special cases at least as common - should MuseScore provide decidated commands to handle each and every one? I think it's much better to provide a set of tools that can be used to accomplish whatever unusual special case you have in mind, and that's exactly what MuseScore does. It's not it takes more than a couple of seconds to extend the bracket. Ad if those couple of extra seconds really bother you that much, just create a template that has this already set up, and use that to start your scores.
In reply to I don't see this as a by Marc Sabatella
I didn't mean to aggravate. MuseScore does so much so well, and those of you who provide it to us deserve medals for what you've produced. You're right: the tools are there to deal with my situation. It would be nice, but I agree not essential, if Hide Empty Staves worked on individual staves within a multi-line stave like an organ part.
In reply to Apologies for causing irritation by FrankO
Actually, that's exactly the sort of more generally useful enhancement I personally find more attractive, and if that's what you had in mind all along, then I apologize for misunderstanding. In fact, I thought I had once submitted a very similar feature request - an option to allow Hide Empty Staves to work within multi-stave instruments. But I don't see it now, so maybe I never did. Most people wouldn't want it on by default as it would ordinarily be disastrous for most piano scores that often have passages where one of the two staves is empty. But I actually almost always define piano parts in my big band scores to be two one-staff instruments specifically to get this behavior. So I seldom think about this any more - the technique exists and works well.
In reply to Hide empty staves doesn't do it by FrankO
Surely there's acres of organ music without the pedals involved which needs the pedal staff to vanish temporarily?
In fact the usual convention in organ music with a pedal part is to retain all three staves throughout the piece showing rests where necessary. There are exceptions to this, however.
When writing organ music in 1.3 I always remove the 3rd stave and replace it with a single stave from another instrument, as usually you need to use a different sound for pedal parts suited to the low register.
In 2.0 preview, however, this is not currently possible with the incarnation of the Aeolus pipe organ synth.