Creating New Staves and Setting Up Tracks

This chapter teaches you how to create new staves, assign instrument names and set up some features of tracks.

Adding Staves
At the end of the last chapter, the score consisted of two voices in the treble clef. The next task is to add some left-hand accompaniment.
1.)  To create the bass clef, select the Insert Bass Staff tool from the Staves palette.
 










2.)  Move the pointer below the treble clef, so that the pointer becomes an up arrow. When you’re in position, click the mouse.
      The bass clef appears in the proper position.
 







Now add a brace so the staves appear as conventional left-hand/right-hand piano notation (known as a “grand staff.”)

1.)  Select the Group With Brace tool from the Staves palette.
 





2.)  Drag a box that spans the two staves.
 





      When you release the button, the brace appears. Your screen should look like Figure 4.1
 










Figure 3.1:  Bass and treble clefs grouped with brace

All that remains is to add a barline through the system.
1.)  Select the Cross-Staff Barlines tool from the Staves palette.
 





2.)  Drag a box around both staves.
      A barline appears, connecting the two staves.
 







Staves that are played together are known as Systems. Overture has many features that can affect all the staves or measures in a system at once. See Chapter 2 of the Reference Manual for full details.

Setting Up Staves
In this section, you will tell Overture that the staves are piano parts.

1.)  Click anywhere in the top staff to make it the active one.

2.)  Choose Score>Setup Track.
      The Setup Track dialog box opens:
 



















SHORTCUT: Double-clicking a staff’s selector handle also opens this dialog box.


3.)  In the Instrument box is a pop-up menu that currently reads “Instrument Name”. This menu contains a list of common instruments. Use it to choose Piano for the current track.
 
     






      





      Notice that the name boxes fill in automatically.

4.)  Check the Show Name box.
      This causes the instrument name to be displayed to the left of the staff.

5.)  Click OK.
Using the Setup Track dialog box, you can change many properties of each track including
•which lines of the staff are displayed
•which elements of the staff are displayed
•scale of entire staff
•transposition if different from concert key