Is swapping staves possible? It could be very useful.

• Mar 21, 2021 - 08:24

Explode is a useful technique to use sometimes, for example when mapping a piano part to a wind or string quartet. Sometimes the result of this might result in a score where the instruments are not the best for each part - in the opinion of the composer or arranger - and it would be useful to swap some of them over.

A simple approach would be to swap adjacent staves - though other more complicated methods could be developed. I realise that this can be done by creating a spare stave, but it would be much easier to just be able to swap some staves over.


Comments

You can swap staves before the explode by moving them around in the Instruments windows (under Edit menu).

Or you can select all contents of a staff , cut it and then use the swap command on another staff and paste the swapped out contents back in the original staff.

In reply to by jeetee

The first method assumes that you know you want to do that beforehand, and also that the staves you want to swap aren't somehow embedded in the voices of the originals.

The second - yes I found the manual pages but so far not succeeded in actually making that method work. It ought to work, but I've not made it happen yet. Sadly another example where some form of temporary intermediate storage might need to be constructed - thus slowing operations down - arguably considerably.

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