Hi Peeps.

A video here for everyone but specifically you Greg H. I'm trying to cover the challenges of writing across different sectors of the board with more consistency and hope to further this discussion.

I may be playing catch up here, so if there are folk who have already dealt with this, thanks for chiming in regardless.

As I get more into writing my own or performing others music, the challenges of pianistic style writing in staff tab, seem to continue.

Your thoughts?

Rad, me old!

So glad to see you delving deeper into things with StaffTab.

A few thoughts from me.

When dividing a chord that has tight clusters with a larger interval in between, use the fact that the strings can create the larger gap, rather than trying to cover the close voicings in each hand.

So, I would play the C and F# on the 4th and 5th bass strings, and then the D and G# on the two lowest melody strings.

As far as notation conventions go, if you are using two hands on one set of strings, as you indicated, point the right hand note stems up and the left down. You the write the fret numbers under the individual staff for the left hand and over the individual staff for right hand.

Personally, I think the thing that would help you the most would be to get more geometrically uniform notehead shapes happening. I don't know anything about Sebelius's capability in this regard, but I'm sure it's there, somehow.. This would make it easier to see the different noteheads more easily, thereby improving the reading process for an admittedly dense notation system.

Hope that helps.

Hey Greg.

Thanks for your well considered reply, always a buzz.

So I seem to be on the right track with note stems up and down. I wasn't aware of the designation for top and bottom fret numbers within one stave, so thanks!

By consistency of note heads, do you just mean the usual staff tab fingering symbols?
I left that off the piano example and the rest contained staff tab fingering.... Did I hear you right there? As it happens, at times I've stopped using staff tab just so I get my note reading down a lot better, forcing me to read notes. Staff tab is an awesome tool, especially during the first few years, helping a newbie to negotiate the touchboard. It's even better for more difficult stuff and helps to make things clear for me, when returning to a new transcription or similar.

Anyhow, it's all becoming clearer and quicker each year, I just needed that encouragement to stay on track.

Cheers,

Not to hijack your post and change directions, but...

I've never written anything in stafftab until recently. I've joined up with a flute player, rehearsing some duets that we've each written. I love her writing and chordal structures...so different from mine, for sure!

In learning her pieces, I occasionally wrote out individual chords (mostly right hand). Mainly, I wanted a smooth blend between chord changes and not anything choppy-sounding or bland root position fingerings that I play out of habit.

Seeing the written stafftab picture helped during my individual practice.

Hey brother Brian.

Everyones journey is different I'm sure. Thanks for sharing your recent exploits and experiences.

Having a means to just “write it down” and have that available as a reference is huge - I don’t use staff tab, or tabulature but I have always used notation and at the very least chord symbols... it helps in learning, band practice, teaching etc etc...

So yeah cool thread, keep on scoring!

Hey guys, I use StaffTab every day. Every thought, every exercise, every notion, gets written down this way. It's my long-term memory.

So anyway, I use two staves for the left hand, treble and bass. The range is just too big with the fifths tuning for a single staff to cover that. Also, I play an octave lower than written. The right hand, in treble clef, also gets transposed down an octave.

I use Baritone Melody tuning, so my highest note is a Bb above the top Bb on the first ledger line of treble clef.

Here's the geometric shapes I use -
index - just the notehead, or alt-shift zero
middle - alt-shift 6, for the diamond
ring - alt-shift 16 (hit the 1 & the 6 very quickly together), for the triangle
pinky - alt-shift 21 (again, hit the numbers quickly together) for the square
thumb - alt-shift 44 for the inverted triangle

for the line to indicate the string, I hit the "L" to select a line, and move it into place, adjusting the length.

So if I'm bringing the right hand over to play on the bass strings, I just put in a text to indicate that (control-T). Same for left hand playing on treble strings. I might also use a bracket of some kind to disambiguate.

I use Sibelius 6, the last version before the dreaded ribbon interface.

R