Changing instruments mid-staff

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BortV

Post by BortV » Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:15 pm

How do you change instruments in the middle of a piece? I have a percussion part with many different instruments. I was able to sort of get it to work when I changed the xylo part to bells, but it didn't sound quite right. I tried to switch a chimes part to cymbal or tambourine, but it didn't work. I'm not exactly sure how to fix it. Thanks


Lurker

Post by Lurker » Tue Feb 08, 2005 12:37 pm

BortV wrote:How do you change instruments in the middle of a piece? I tried to switch a chimes part to cymbal or tambourine, but it didn't work.
If you use a GM synth (e.g. Microsoft Wavetable Synth) you can't put pitched percussion on the same stave as non-pitched percussion. Non-pitched percussion needs to be on Channel 10 for GM and ch 10 will only play the drum sounds (they're stored differently to other patches).

If your synth is DX or some other formats, you may find you can switch between the two, but maybe not using ch 10. For instance, Yamaha DX series needs a patch of ~P127,1,0 for non-pitched percussion, along with a clef change and a Staff Type change (to "Drum Kit" or whatever).

The 'official' Sibelius answer is to have your pitched percussion on one stave and the other instruments on a separate stave, on Ch. 10. If (and it's a big if) you only change from pitched to non-pitched after a page or system break, you can hide one or other of the staves to make it look as if the percussion is written on one stave, but it's then a bother getting the extracted parts right.

Zapruder
Posts: 380
Joined: Thu Jan 20, 2005 1:39 am

Post by Zapruder » Tue Feb 08, 2005 1:03 pm

Another way of coping with this problem is this one:

- Have one staff (in this case "percussion") as the "Graphic Staff" which you can put all objects and changes into. Use this staff to extract the part from. In the mixer, mute this staff.

- Create all the percussion instruments you need on separate staves. These staves are the "Playback Staves". Copy all the material from the graphic staff into the respective playback staves (or the other way around).

- This way, you can make the graphic staff / part look good AND retain flexible playback.

- Use "focus on staves" to "hide" the playback staves if you need to.



Zap
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