Request for an option to Hide Staff except Lyrics, Chord symbols, Fretboard diagrams

Visible lyric line but without it's parent staff or notation.

I often want to show the lyrics of a particular staff while excluding display of all other aspects of the staff notation—such as the "parent" staff itself, and all notational symbols and all rests. The most likely use case is when I want lyrics displayed and aligned along with an accompaniment part.

So I’m requesting an option to Show Lyrics Only or Hide Parent Staff of Lyrics or “Display lyrics from Staff x”—the latter may be an ideal interface design pattern for including other aspects like “Display Chord Symbols from Staff x”

Here are some use cases of a “Show Lyrics only” feature:

• to display and align lyrics relative to an accompaniment part, for instance, a piano staff or guitar tablature. (This needed because It’s not always possible to copy/paste lyrics into an accompaniment staff.)

• the scorist simply wants to display lyrics as a rough “timing” guide and does not need to convey lyric pitches. This produces performance notation for the musician reading an accompaniment who also needs to see lyrics.

• to display lyrics but also conserve vertical space

• to create tablature scores aimed at musicians who don't read treble clef. The treble staff is meaningless to that population but they may want to see the lyrics aligned an tablature accompaniment staff.

• to declutter a lyric-bearing score.

Here's an example of a tablature accompaniment with lyrics aligned.

Granted, one could achieve this result with considerable effort by entering lryrics as Staff Text objects. In contrast, one advantage to the requested feature is that the still the lyrics and "hidden" staff remain easily editable by toggling the staff notation's visibility in the main score (via control/command i) or by editing in a Part.

MuseScore's Instruments dialog provides the option to toggle visiblity of entire instruments. Accordingly, one solution would be a checkbox there to "Show lyrics only"

Similarly, in the Instruments dialog (or perhaps a View Show/Hide dialog) it would great to have this feature, AND greater granularity to allow scorists to:

   • Hide one or more of the instrument's staves. (I think presently we can only hide entire Instruments)
   • Show just Chord symbols
   • Show just Chord diagrams

Maybe something like this:

Thanks!

scorster