Different dynamics for different clefs on a Grand Staff

• Dec 8, 2016 - 17:06

I want to balance that left and right hands of my score. When I apply a dynamic to one clef, it applies to the whole staff. I've seen other discussions to this effect, bu they're outdated.


Comments

FWIW, unless you are going for some unusual special effect here, I wouldn't recommend using dynamics for this. First, it would not be normal for music to be published that way - human pianists would just naturally know to bring out the melody line(s). While you could make the extra dynamics invisible, now you're locked in a bit and it's harder to change the dynamics later. For example, if you have a passage marked "f" and you use an invisible dynamic to reduce the left hand only to "mf", but then you decide to change the overall dynamic there to "mf", or to "ff", or to "p", or whatever, you'll need to find and update the correspond dynamic in the other hand as well or things will be off.

Instead, consider selecting passages you want quieter and using the Inspector to reduce the Velocity a bit. This will continue to do the right thing if you then change dynamics later.

I guess there are tradeoffs here, so depending on the use case, either approach might be better, but definitely don't assume using separate dynamics for the two hands is the way to go just to emulate the way a real pianist would try to emphasize the melody.

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