Arpege
Music

French

Europe (English)

Creating systems with different number of staves

Pizzicato Professional and Pizzicato Notation have a function to optimize the staves displayed for an orchestral score. This means that when only a few instruments are playing in the orchestra, the other staves are not displayed in the conductor score, which takes much less space in the page layout. This function may be used to create a page with systems that do not have the same number of staves. Here is how you do it.

First you need to decide the way the page layout will be, how the systems, staves and measures will be organized. We will take an example with 2 systems with 2 staves of 4 measures, 1 system with 3 staves of 5 measures and 1 system with 2 staves of 4 measures.

Use the "Linear mode" template to create this score. You can find it in "File, Open a template...", in the "Templates" item. This template includes 1 measure with 1 staff.

Add the number of measures and staves.The score will include 4+4+5+4 = 17 measures. For the staves, you must create systems which include the maximum number of staves, thus 3 staves. Add thus 16 measures and 2 staves to the existing score template.

Create a page layout by selecting the page mode (small menu with Linear/Page/Global on the tool bar).

With the "+" and '-' buttons of the page (display them with the ":" shortcut), adjust the systems so that they display respectively 4, 4, 5 and 4 measures. At this step, all systems have 3 staves.

Encode the score content, but only in the staves you want to keep. In other words, the first two staves of each system must contain notes, as well as the third staff of the third system. On systems 1, 2 and 4, the third staff must stay empty.

You can now right-click on one system and select "Visible staves...". Using the list of staves, you can double-click the staves that must not be displayed so that they go in the "Invisible staves" column. Do that for the systems that must only show 2 staves and the score is displaying them as it should.