Change instrument halfway in the score

• Sep 21, 2013 - 13:44

Is it possible to change the instrument of a staff halfway through the score? This happens often with percussion parts.

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• Sep 21, 2013 - 15:52

I assume, btw, you mean for playback. It's already perfectly possible to add a text marking telling the human person who will ultimately read the score to change instruments - ordinary staff text would uffice. You can also write the aprts on separate staves and use the Hide Empty Staves feature (style / general) to create the illusion of a single part. Also, for drums specifically, you can use drumset as the instrument and have as many different "instruments" as you like.

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• Sep 21, 2013 - 21:11

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but this is a challenge which I am also dealing with at the present time. Is the above the best workaround for parts where a musician has to switch to an instrument which may have a different transposition? I'm sure there must be a mechanism by which to assign a particular staff to a given musician rather than a set instrument, but it is probably as complex as the workaround.

I am thinking specifically in regard to music theatre orchestras where "Reed 1" might be scored for Flute, Clarinet and Alto Sax. How do I deal with a situation where Reed 2 switches from Clarinet to Flute while Reed 1 is playing Alto? (This happens more often than one might think... the scoring for Cats uses the following: REED I (Flute, Tenor Sax, Soprano Sax) REED II (Clarinet, Baritone Sax, Flute)) In this instance, there would often be no "empty staves" to hide, and simply adding text to instruct the musician does not deal with the issue of different transpositions for the instruments.

Again, I do not wish to hijack the thread or distract from the issue at hand, but the two seem related and I have not seen a recent thread that addresses this problem.

Cheers,
Tom

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• Sep 21, 2013 - 21:59

There are perhaps equally good/bad workarounds (eg, transposing the sections for the "doubles" manually), but no really good solutions. And unfortunately, no current plans I know of for the instrument change playback facility in 2.0 to deal with transposition, either. On my extremely short list of most needed improvements I'd hope to see in the next release *after* 2.0.

But perhaps you aren't understanding the workaround I suggested. Yes, there would be empty staves. I'm suggesting not having a single "reed 1" staff, but simply having separate staves for each instrument. So each instrument would be empty while the other is used. Define the "reed 1" *part* to include all relevant staves, and turn on Hide Empty Staves for the part. It does work, if you make sure all instrument change happens at line breaks.

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• Sep 21, 2013 - 22:01

Thanks, Marc.
I am not particularly concerned with playback, other than hearing correct pitches when I am auditioning a score. For now, I am simply printing two (or three) parts for the musician, in which they can switch instruments while one instrument or the other is resting.

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• Sep 21, 2013 - 22:28

Same here. I'll usually enter the music at concert pitch, using playback along the way, then turn off concert pitch. At that poiint either I manually transpose passages for the doubles or else I generate parts as is and manually transpose there. Either way, i always save a copy of the score that plays back correctly, either as my only copy of the score or in addition to the visually correct copy. It's an extras step and a bother, but it works, and the parts look exactly as I want.

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