A grid drum staff is a staff type used for non-chromatic sounds, such as drum beats. The grid drum staff does not offer either pitch or duration variance for the notes it contains, but sounds are easily distributable in time, by the use of spatial visualization of a timeline; grid drum staves allow the user to input notes anywhere at a division of a beat, which can be chosen.
Since the staff type is not commonly used in a score, grid drums do not have a large customization equipment dealing with graphical appearance, as staff types such as standard staves do. However, certain changes such as line color or note color from the display options dialog do affect the look of the staff.
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The staff options menu contains the following items:
- An option to activate or deactivate the staff
- A rename option
- The display panel
- Bar numbering
- 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
- An option to show or hide objects on the staff. In this case, objects represent mostly anything else than notes.
- 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 selection of number of divisions per beat at which the staff will insert a writable field. When the staff contains symbols who are displaced at a timing that the new division system does not cover, the symbols will be moved to the nearest available position.
Divisions per beat[]
With standard configuration, the user can insert a note on a grid drum staff 4 times per beat. So, for instance, with a time signature of 34, any bar will be split in 12, therefore a drum stroke can be inserted at any sixteenth note. However, if the user desires to insert an eighth note triplet at some point, a different splitting must be made. In this case, the clef tool can be used. When on a grid drum staff, the clef tool assigns a new division system for the staff from the given point.