Working with grand staff instruments

Piano music generally uses a grand staff, which is two staves together. To create a grand staff instrument in Soundslice, use the “Piano (grand staff)” preset when creating your instrument.

Note that Soundslice treats this as two separate instruments but has some special magic to associate them together. If two instruments are marked as grand staff with one another, then:

• Their notation will have the traditional brace connecting them.
• Barlines will be drawn connecting the two staves.
• The “Hide empty staves” feature will only hide the staves if both of them are empty in a given system.
• The visual keyboard feature will treat them as a single instrument, allowing for switching between left and right hands.
• The instruments will support cross-staff notation.
• Pedal markings will always be displayed under the bottom stave, even if they’re entered for the top stave.

Combining two staves into a grand staff

You can toggle whether two instruments are treated as a single grand staff. (You might want to do this, for example, if you’ve imported a notation file that didn’t properly encode the instruments as a grand staff.)

To do this:

1. Select a note or rest in the first of the two instruments.
2. In the editor search, search for the command “Toggle grand staff on selected instrument” and run that command.

Deleting one of the staves

A final note on grand staff instruments: You have the freedom to delete one of the two instruments at any time. For example, you might want to do this if your music only uses one of the staves.