Palm Muting on the guitar

I realise this has come up before a number of times:

https://musescore.org/en/node/24410
https://musescore.org/en/node/47146
http://musescore.org/en/node/21707
http://musescore.org/en/node/23096

... but I just want to check I've got it right.

I want to achieve palm muting on the guitar during play back. Typically guitar parts may mute for a note or measure or two then release. This may happen many times during a score. According to my understanding I can achieve this in one of two ways:

1. Create two staves and put all the muted notes in one and the open notes in another, or
2. Use the Instrument option in the Text pallet each time I want to flip between muted and un-muted.

The two stave option is problematic as its awkward to keep jumping between two staves when playing a score. And the Instrument Text option is difficult as (unless I'm missing something) each time I flip between muted and un-muted I get a new entry in the mixer that needs to have its sound set accordingly. Even though I have only two states (muted and un-muted) I acquire an additional instrument each time I flip from one to the other. The problem is that all entries have the name part name and before long I have a huge list of indistinguishable entries that becomes impossible to manage: I cannot tell which 'instrument' relates to any particular part of the score.

I'm happy to live with it if that's the way it is (I think Musescore is fantastic and this is a minor inconvenience) but I want to check if I'm bashing my head against a wall unnecessarily - is there a better way?