Cutaway scores

A cutaway score is one in which staves can begin and end in mid-system, appearing and disappearing in the score as necessary.

It’s easy enough to create scores in Finale with full-width staves that are present in each system only when they contain notes; indeed, hiding staves that contain only rests is the sole purpose of Finale’s system optimization feature (see Optimizing systems).

Such staves still occupy the full margin-to-margin width of the system, however. If you want a staff to begin or end halfway across the page (when the other staves in the system continue all the way to the page margins), you can hide the portion of each staff you don’t want to appear using Staff Styles. See also Masks.

To hide a portion of a staff

1. Click the Staff Tool  , and select the measures that you want to hide. See Selecting music for more information on selection methods.
2. From the Staff menu, choose Apply Staff Styles To > Score and Parts (or Current Part/Score). The Apply Staff Styles dialog box appears.
3. Select Hide Staff and click OK. All the staves in the selected region will be hidden. To clear the Staff Style, re-select the measures and choose Clear Staff Styles From (and then the desired score/part option) from the Staff menu. Alternatively, you can control-click the highlighted region and choose Hide Staff from the context menu.

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