Hiding empty staves

This section is critical for people who plan to work with orchestral scores.

When a publisher assembles an orchestral score, it’s customary to remove any staff, within a given system, that consists entirely of rests. If, for example, you have a score for a 24-piece orchestra that begins with a 16-measure flute solo, you probably don’t want that flute solo to consume four full score pages—with 23 blank instrumental staves on each page. Instead, you’d want the flute line to appear by itself for the first few lines of music.

Finale can perform this suppression of blank staves for you, for either selected staves in selected systems, or for the whole piece at once using the Staff Tool.

1. Click the Staff tool  . The Staff menu appears.
2. Select the empty staves you want to hide. Or, press Ctrl+A to select all.
3. From the Staff menu, choose Hide Empty Staves. The empty staves disappear, and a dashed gray line appears in their place. To show the staves, select the handle on the left edge of the dashed line, then from the Staff menu, choose Show Empty Staves (or the specific staff you would like to show). You can also press Ctrl+A to select all and then choose Staff menu > Show Empty Staves to show all hidden staves.

Note that hidden staves will continue to be visible in Scroll View. If music is added to a hidden staff in Scroll View, or moved to a hidden staff automatically due to Automatic Music Spacing or manual adjustments to the measure layout, Finale will display the staff automatically.

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