In flamenco pieces we use many repetitions often with small changes in a chord.
Instead of painting the score totally black, repeated chords are noted with single lines.
Little changes are shown with only the note changed, so you see instantly what to change.
A lot can be achieved with headless notes, but there are caveats:
1. (Help) ledger lines appear below or above the ledger while I only want to have the stem line repeated, not the extra ledger lines;
2. In the guitar tab, there is not alternative for the headless note.
Unless playback is important (only the top note plays), the attached may be an option. This is achieved by creating a new notehead (#31 in the attached) with up-stem shortened by -3.5. It works well for notation, not so well for tab.
You can edit the Headless style (or New one from it) to not use ledger lines, and playback will work (though they are invisible so be careful with them).
As Adrian points out, there is not much you can do with tab. Notehead styles do not affect tab, and while you can play with the font for a tab staff, it is kind of all or nothing, and mixing numbers with just staff lines does not work.
So in the tab you could delete all but the top note but have no extended staff, or leave them in and assume that they will at least glance at the notation staff to see what is missing.
Bob, I should point out that there is a headless notehead (#7) included in the default list and, on inspection, this already has leger lines unchecked. But as long as the top chord note is normal (#0), leger lines still appear on headless notes that drop below the staff. I don't know why this happens, but it does. This is the reason why I have always used a homemade notehead style with extended downstem for this purpose. As an option, if playback is important, the whole chord can be entered in voice 2 and hidden.
Aha, PS, I have the answer. Create a new notehead based on #0 and uncheck leger line. So now the top note is legerless and all others headless. Of course this is still only good for notation, not tab.
Clever. But when the top note needs a leger line? Perhaps I would just use normal top notheads and always set the lowest note to d. (If Playback isn't important.)
I like these riddles :-)
For Tab you can create a new tab staff type and set it to use letters instead of numbers and don't "white out around notes".In the Rhythm tab uncheck "only draw stems beyound extra space".
Then if you set the Textstyle of "Tablature letters" to a very tiny size of 0.5,regular they appear smaller than the tablature lines.
Now you can just insert this style as instrument change when needed.
But your solution works if you work with 2 voices: Voice 1 for upper notes with leger lines and Voice 3 for bottom notes without leger lines.
To be honest, I would fake all with vertical lines. A custom vertical line of the same width as the stems. and then copy and paste. This would also be the best solution for Tabs when a number is needed. (The above "letter solution" is good when only Rhythm is needed)
thank you for the thinking, it is very appreciated :-)
Leaving out the the lower notes of the chord is what I do, with the impact on the playback.
I hope product support will pick it up and writes something structural to this problem a "Repeated chord option", that will repeat all notes headless, except for the top one and changed notes (for mainly pull off's and hammer on's).
Is there a location where I can bring this to the Sibelius product management team?
Since apparently the trick was to make the size of the font in the text style Tablature Letters very small, I suspect that when the text file font was changed it was changed in the score only, not the part.
And bingo (see screenshot).
I have to say, I never would have come up with this one. Nice job, Kai.
Can you please point me to where this setting is to be found?
I have looked in Edit Instrument, and can't see where to do it there, also in Engraving Rules for Guitar, which covers all Guitar. Screenshots show where I've looked for this.
Text/Styles/EditTextStyles (or shft/ctrl/alt/t). Select 'Tablature letters'. Hit Edit. Enter "0" for Size in score and Size in parts. Sib defaults to 0.5 in both. It won't go any smaller than that, but it practically hides the letters. You would need a microscope to see them. Warning: This will be a global setting.
> Text/Styles/EditTextStyles (or shft/ctrl/alt/t). Select 'Tablature letters'. Hit Edit. Enter "0" for Size in score and Size in parts. Sib defaults to 0.5 in both. It won't go any smaller than that, but it practically hides the letters. You would need a microscope to see them. Warning: This will be a global setting.
Spoke too soon!
Please refer to the attached Score and screenshots of Guitar Part and PDF export, showing that the amended zero font size is forgotten, and I am still getting the alpha characters, regardless of whether I export as PDF or print directly to the printer. The page looks fine in Sibelius both in Score and Part view.