Unwanted Clefs Magically Appearing

• Apr 5, 2011 - 23:04

I admit that it's probably my own fault that I can't remove the invisible clefs from the second staff of this chart, but it screws up the note spacing. Any ideas, anyone?


Comments

Woah, where did all those clefs come from?

But the bigger question is, why did you create a whole separate staff just to place your chord symbols? If it was just because you wanted the chords to show up below the staff - which, BTW, is very unusual, and will probably confuse anyone reading this score - you can accomplish that by changing the "Y" parameter in the Chordname text style. A value of around 8 would put the chords about where you have them, without the need to a second hidden staff.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for your response, but I'm not interested in discussing why I want my chord chart to appear like it does. I am, on the other hand, interested in finding out what all the extra clefs are doing, and how/if I can remove them. So to staunch any further arguments about standard or non-standard lead sheets, let's use the following file for further discussions.

Attachment Size
theme_clefs.mscz 6.15 KB
  1. Press i and add a new cowbell instrument
  2. Select your first cowbell measure, press shift and click on the very last measure
  3. Copy paste on the second cowbell line
  4. Press i and delete your original cowbell
  5. make the staff invisible and the rests invisible (right click on one, select -> More -> Same staff)

I hope nothing is lost in the process. I did a quick check only.

It would be great of you can explain why you create your sheet like this. It's always good to learn something new and all use case are interesting. I don't want to discuss the way you are notating music, but just learn why you are doing so because it could drive the development or because there is a simpler way of doing it for the same result.

If you manage to know how all these undeletable clefs appears, please let us know.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

All is well with my chart, thanks to you. The cause of the unwanted clefs is the LINE BREAK; add one and watch a new clef appear. (I'm using v1.0, revision 3996, standard Ubuntu repo package)

The reason for my chord-chart unorthodoxy is twofold: on the one hand, I play with a number of skilled improvisers who don't read well; their song books are often presented in chord charts like the attachment below ("My Heart"). I'm curious if the barlines between the chords will be easy enough on the eyes that I won't get flack for bringing in a 3-pager. The second reason is that it's often very confusing to incorporate dynamics into a lead sheet, and I'm always on the lookout for ways to get musical information across in a more concise way.

Thanks again for your help!
-Kip

In reply to by kipjones.net

Ah yes, the idea of chord charts with no melody at all is common enough, so I could see why you would want to have a staff that has nothing but chords on it. That makes it easy to simply extract that part to produce that type of chart. I'd still personally recommend that if you *do* combine the notation and the chords, that you put the chord staff above the notation staff unless you have a special reason to want to do otherwise, as that's practically universally what people would expect to see, and deviating from that would likely to lead to reading errors among *most* musicians. But again, perhaps you don't need the chart to work for most musicians - just the musicians you currently work with. And it's easy enough to change the order of the staves later if you ever do work with other musicians.

Mostly, I had just wanted to make sure you were aware you didn't need a separate staff just to make chords appear where you wanted, which is what I was guessing the reason for the separate staff was.

Just another personal opinion, but based on what you've said, I'd recommend you do extract the chord staff into a separate part and print just that, as yes, three page charts really can be more of a pain than two. They require page turns when bound (including a binder full of sheet protectors), and don't fit on many music standards. So if they don't need the notes, lose them, I say.

That's still so odd that adding line breaks adds new clefs. Certainly doesn't happen normally. So I'm still wondering what might have triggered it here.

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