Linking two guitar staves to a single tab

• May 15, 2025 - 13:50

I am writing a guitar part in three voices, which makes the single stave very cluttered. Two of the voices have the same stem direction, of course, which makes it difficult to tell which is which. The obvious solution is to move the bass voice onto a separate stave, but then it disappears from the linked tab. Is there a way (or a workaround) that I can link a single tab to both staves?


Comments

"I am writing a guitar part in three voices, which makes the single stave very cluttered."
Can you attach an image of some measures of your score? Or entire score in PDF ?
But if you do: Voice1 for melodic line, Voice 2 for intermediate voice, and Voice 4 for Bass line, it will be OK (certainly not cluttered, it's a very common situation in classical guitar)
EDIT: it's no clear: " which makes the single stave very cluttered". Are you talking of a standard staff or TAB staff?

In reply to by cadiz1

I've attached a few bars as an example. I keep having to move beams and shorten stems of voice 2 notes because they are placed on top of the voice 3 notes by default and often obscure augmentation dots. There is often no room for rests, and it's also very difficult to tell which rests relate to which voice. It's not unusual for guitar parts to be written on a grand staff, which would instantly solve all these problems and make the score much more readable - but having to create an unlinked tab and enter the notes again manually without errors and inconsistencies would be a nightmare!

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Image1.jpg 92.89 KB

In reply to by rduerden

"I'm not sure that using voice 4 instead of voice 3 will make any difference"
Of course it's make a difference, since the notes in Voice 3 (by default) are oriented upwards, while those in Voice 4 are oriented downwards.
I'll take a look and suggest something.

In reply to by cadiz1

See the image below, with input step by step. Everything's running smoothly. As I said, with Voices 1, 2 and 4, I never had to change the direction of the stems. Everything falls into place automatically. The only editing required is at the level of two beams in Voice 2 (to avoid a collision with the Bass voice notes). But, frankly, as I said, this is a very common situation in guitar. I've typed several hundred classical guitar scores (I was a teacher and performer) :)

beams.png

I did wonder about using cross staff notation to display the bass line on a second staff whilst leaving it linked to the tab. Unfortunately this crashes Musescore 3.7, I haven't tried it with Musescore 4.

In reply to by rothers

"I did wonder about using cross staff notation to display the bass line on a second staff "
Really? Cross staff notation in guitar? I'd say that, at a glance, 60/70% of the guitar repertoire is made up of three-voice polyphony on a single standard staff. Very-very common and standardized in all publications.
Then, if anyone wants to "invent" something, that's up to them, but I rather think the OP had lost its way with misused voices (and this is far from rare in what I see in guitar scores on musescore.com).

In reply to by cadiz1

Using voice 4 really doesn't make a difference. When I've used voice 3, I've just flipped the stem direction (as my screen shot shows). Whichever voice I use, I still end up with stems, beams and rests conflicting with one another. I can easily put the bass part on a separate stave, which makes it much more legible - I just need both staves to be linked to the tab.

Maybe you could use 2 notation staves and 1 TAB stave like this:

1) Stave 1 : Notation
• 3 voices with all the 3rd voice elements hidden

2) Stave 2 : Notation
• Copy of Stave 1 but with all 1st and 2nd voice elements hidden.

3) Stave 3 : TAB linked to Stave 2

Then mute playback on stave 1. A bit of effort to maintain but could be automated via a plugin. Not sure how easy it would be to read as I only use TAB.

In reply to by yonah_ag

Thanks for that. I might also be able to do it by creating two additional linked staves, hiding voice 3 on the first and hiding voices 1 and 2 on the second. Then I can hide the original "master" stave, which will contain all the voices and also links to the tab. However, when I try doing this, the stems and beams of all quavers in the linked staves disappear! (See attached.) If I delete and re-enter them, the stems and beams come back. This must be a bug.

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Image1.jpg 119.03 KB

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