Hiding empty staves

• Sep 5, 2019 - 10:35

Well, so I switched this on, since my latest effort (Fl, Cl, Piano) has a piano solo section in the middle. Really I only want to hide both Fl and Cl when both are empty, and in the piano score I never want to hide the piano. Is there a clever way of doing this? If not, I accept that as being fussy, but:

Problem: a line has only treble notes in the piano part, and MS has therefore hidden the bass clef. I don't think this is expected behaviour; the "grand staff" is a single unit, and should either be there or not. I know that there are complications: if the piano part uses three or four staves, would it be obvious quite which to hide? But, surely, you just hide until there are a minimum of two.


Comments

You can set a staff to never hide in its staff properties
But to not hide e.g. Fl. it it is empty but Cl is not is not possible, unless you use invisible (and silent) notes (in a voice other than 1)

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Yes, I can see it is possible to set hide or not per staff, and I understand that asking for special treatment for two parts like flute and clarinet is a bit unreasonable. So I have to use the visibility kludge: why a voice other than 1? What about cues? If I make a cue invisible, this suggests it may mess up the empty staff hiding. Are you saying that voices 1 and !1 are treated differently?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Sorry, I cannot understand your answer. I understand what it says, but not the connection to my question. I understand the first part of your original answer to say that it is not possible to make hiding (say) the clarinet be conditional on the flute also being empty, and I understand that. So I think this means I have to write an "invisible" note on each staff that I want to prevent from being hidden. But I do not understand why you say "in a voice other than 1".

For the piano, if you never want to hide it, right click each staff and set the Hide when empty option to never. If you want to retain the option of hiding the entire instrument when both staves are empty (like during a flute cadenza) set the Hide when empty option to instrument on each staff.

In reply to by mike320

For the next week or two I'm still on version 2; I guess this "instrument" thing is new in version 3? But one of my points was that I think it is extremely nonstandard ever (almost; I do have one score...) to reduce the piano to a single staff. Do I have to say that somewhere else on the grounds that it is not "support"?

In reply to by Imaginatorium

The instrument option is indeed new for MuseScore 3. But it's not rare to want that at all. Quite common for instruments that sometimes take one but sometimes two staves (eg, marimba), or for piano in a jazz context where portions for the arrangement are just chord symbols, or for a staff that temporarily splits into two (a solo staff on the first violin part), etc.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

(Thanks - I have just got version 3 running.) You may be right that it is more common than I thought to want a single staff for piano, but I still think it is not expected behaviour for a "grand staff" to get chopped in half. That is solved by the "instrument" setting (incidentally, the "Auto" in that menu is opaque: it used to say "not the first system", which I think it what it means).

But it would be nice functionality, and surely not too hard to implement, to allow "pseudo-instruments" (like SATB as a classic example) which were either completely hidden or not. That would cover most accompanied choral works very nicely. (Vastly better than Oxford, for example)

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hey Marc, sorry to revive an old thread instead of making a new one, but this came up high in my google search & might be relevant for people find it that way.

Is there an option to toggle hiding for one staff of the grand staff but not the other? So, in a score where the piano has a few written parts, mostly comps, and occasionally lays out. I don't want it to disappear in the full score when it's resting, just take up less space like when it's comping.

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