User manual

Staves
A staff is a line or group of lines on which musical notes are notated to indicate the pitch and
rhythm of music. Pitched instruments use the traditional ve-line staff and unpitched
instruments often use a single-line staff.
Notes are positioned on the lines and in the spaces on ve-line staves, and can also use ledger
lines above/below the staff to represent pitches that cannot t on the staff.
A phrase on a ve-line staff The same phrase on a single-line staff
The pitch and register of notes on ve-line staves are determined by clefs, which can also be
combined with octave lines to indicate what pitches performers play.
On ve-line staves for unpitched percussion instruments, the different staff positions correspond
to different percussion instruments.
Because it is often necessary to have different staff sizes in different layouts depending on their
type, such as having smaller staves in full score layouts than in part layouts, in Dorico SE you can
change various aspects of staves in
Setup > Layout Options.
RELATED LINKS
Clefs on page 548
Octave lines on page 553
Percussion kit presentation types on page 873
Hiding/Showing empty staves on page 336
Per-layout options for staves
You can change settings that affect the staves in each layout independently.
You can change the size of staves in each layout in the Space Size section of the Page Setup
page in Setup > Layout Options.
You can change other aspects of staves on the Staves and Systems page in Layout Options. For
example, you can change which staff labels are shown on systems, indent the rst system of
each ow, and x the number of bars included in each system. You can also select above which
staves system objects appear, according to their instrument families.
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Dorico SE 3.1.10