Re: Why use hidden staves?
Reply #1 –
There are lots of reasons one might find a hidden staff useful and from my point of view they are always associated with getting the aural playback right while leaving the printed score less cluttered. E.G.
1) a "conductor" or "tempo" staff. Where you might want to have tempo variations occur that are easily managed but are subtle enough to not really have any place in the printed score. rit.'s need a beginning and end metronome mark to work, but these usually have no place in the written score, just so the mm for the a tempo that would usually follow.
I also use one of these staves to add "swing" to my jazz scores. A series of quaver (1/8) rests with alternated dotted quaver (1/8) or dotted crotchet mm's with the same numerical value in the speed before each rest. This is an approximation of the swing feel that works well for many tempo's (E.G swing at 120 would be dotted quaver at 120 mm, quaver rest, dotted crotchet mm at 120 then the next quaver rest, rinse and repeat...)
2) playback of some passages. Once upon a time we didn't have access to user objects, so if you wanted, say, a tremolo then you either had to have a bunch of hidden notes cluttering things up and making it hard to have correct notation OR you got the notation right, muted that part and then used a hidden, sounding staff to actually play the tremolo.
3) ditto for subtle dynamic changes
4) a turn, trill or mordent etc...
and so on... anything where you want an effect in the playback but do not need the clutter in the printed score.
For what it's worth, I wrote a workflow suggestion sometime ago for creating lead sheets. Some of the techniques are now redundant, but the fundamental processes still have value:
https://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful/leadsheetsinnwc2.pdf
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