Switching from Unpitched Percussion to Pitched Percussion Using the Same Staff
For percussionists in larger ensembles, this is fairly standard practice; many times, someone playing marimba will have to temporarily switch to something like suspended cymbal or tambourine, or someone playing snare drum may need to switch over to tubular bells/chimes, and the music will be notated on the same staff in the same part, sometimes (but not always) with a change in the amount of shown staff lines (e.g. one staff line to five for a snare drum switching to tuned percussion is not uncommon).
Since this is fairly standard notation, and since, as far as I'm aware, other notation software seems to offer the ability to do this, I think it would be greatly beneficial for MuseScore to implement this.
Comments
I don't think that it's ever going to be possible to change the instrument within the same staff, just because of how MuseScore is designed, but I'd say the easy solution would be to just input the correct notation on secondary and tertiary staves, and then set MuseScore to hide all empty staves. That basically means that for examples in staves 1-6 you're seeing Marimba, then Chimes for stave 7, Bells on stave 8 and Marimba again on staves 9 and upward. The score is clean and the correct sounds are used.
It'll look something like the attached image.
Are you aware about: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/staff-type-change and: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/mid-staff-instrument-changes?