Standard staff

Standard staves are the most used kind of staves, as they represent the most common kind of staves in music in general. This is why standard staves are designed to be as versatile as possible, so they can offer the wide range of options needed when writing common music. A standard staff is usually assigned to an instrument, a group of instruments, a human voice or a group of human voices, which represent chromatic sound emitters. For drums and other non-chromatic sources, grid drum staves and standard drum staves are used more frequently.

Standard staves support three types of clefs: The G clef, the F clef and the C clef. These clefs can take various positions (which can generate for example the C clef's common variants - Soprano, Mezzo-soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone).

Staff menu items

The staff menu for a standard staff includes all available items:

The staff options menu features the next options:

• An option to activate or deactivate the staff
• A rename option
• The display panel
• Bar numbering
• An option to enable or disable the usage of the staff in a chord grid, which, if enabled, means that the staff will be used for chord computation
• The action of selecting the whole staff, which can be also achieved by clicking anywhere in the left side of the staff, except for special fields like adding braces or such
• The action of changing the staff type, which is identical to the staff menu's change staff type item
• Editing related instrument
• Editing velocities
• Editing pressures and delays
• "Change ghost rests into rests", an action which is also available in the staff menu, and which is used to turn blank spaces inside bars who do not contain enough symbols to fill the entire bar into effective rests
• The action of refreshing the stem directions, which does not affect notes whose steam directions have been manually edited
• An option to leave an associated tablature unmodified whenever notes on the staff are changed. Only available if tablature is enabled.
• An option to show or hide objects on the staff. In this case, objects represent mostly anything else than notes, rests, breaks, and other crucial elements in a staff.

• Editing tablature
• The action of refreshing the beams, not affecting notes whose beam value has been manually edited
• The action of splitting the staff in two according to a given note. Any note whose pitch is lower or equal to that note will be moved to a second staff and deleted from the first one. During this action, all ghost rests are turned into rests. The resulting name of the second staff is calculated like this: [Staff name]-2.
• The action of splitting the staff in two according to the notes' stem direction. Similarly to the previous action, this will turn all ghost rests into rests and create a staff named using a "-2" sequence inserted after the original staff name.
• The action of computing stem directions according to a given note. Any note whose pitch is lower or equal to that note will turn the stem downwards. During this operation, all notes' stems are edited, therefore no stem value will remain on "auto".
• The action of saving the tablature and the lyrics associated to the staff into a .tab file. Only available if tablature enabled.
• Editing rules
• Similar to the two staff splitting methods described above, an action which splits a staff into more different staves. In this case, the maximum number of generated staves is unlimited, being equal to the number of rules. On the first staff, only notes without a rule are kept, and again, ghost rests are turned into rests. The name of the resulting staves is calculated like this: [Staff name]-[Rule name]. Only available if the staff contains at least one rule.

• The action of adding a transposing value to the staff, which both changes the location of the notes on the staff and applies a transposition value to the related instrument
• The action of converting dynamics into note velocities. In order to obtain the same audio effect, dynamics must be disabled or erased. Only available if the staff contains any dynamics.
• The inverse action, of generating dynamics based on note velocities

• An option to enable or disable lyrics
• An option to display borders around the lyrics lines. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The edit lyrics panel. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The action of erasing all lyrics from the staff. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The action of computing bar widths according to the lyrics of the given staff, so that these lyrics don't overlap. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The action of moving lyrics to another staff. The lyrics can only be moved to another standard staff or to a text staff. Lyrics will be removed from the original staff. Lyrics will keep data such as font, size and others. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The action of saving the lyrics into a text file. Note that during this operation certain data might be lost. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• The action of loading lyrics from a text file generated using the previous procedure. Only available if lyrics are enabled.
• An option to calculate the notes spacing based on lyrics in realtime. Only available if lyrics are enabled.

• The chord display setup panel
• The action of erasing all the chords from the staff. Only available if chords are enabled.
• The edit chords panel. Only available if chords are enabled.
• The action of moving chords to another staff. The chord line can only be moved to another standard staff or to a text staff. Chords will be removed from the original staff. Only available if chords are enabled.
• The action of saving the chord line into a text file. Note that during this operation certain data might be lost. Only available if chords are enabled.
• The action of loading the chord line from a text file generated using the previous procedure. Only available if chords are enabled.
• The action of creating a staff from the chord line associated with the staff. The name of the resulting staff is calculated like this: [Staff name] (Chords) Only available if chords are enabled and the play chords option is enabled.

• The action of applying a street organ filter, which eliminates notes unplayable by a street organ