Please take a look at this first. This is an example of an electric guitar score, and just like a guitarist steps on the effects pedals at his feet while playing, it switches between three different tones during playback: clean tone, overdrive, and distortion.
This file is structured as follows.
For display purposes, create the top staff “Electric Guitar” with all the notes written on it, and mute this during playback. (You can choose any tone. )
For playback purposes only, create staves “Clean Tone”, “Overdrive”, and “Distortion” corresponding to each of the three tones, and hide these from the score.
Incidentally, in order to express the ghost notes of the guitar that are not normally reproduced in playback in Finale, a single cajon sound, which is a similar tone, is included in the measure 6.
When all the staves are displayed, it will look like this. In other words, the guitarist on stage pretends to play, while the three supporting guitarists actually play each part alternately behind the scenes.
This idea of a “playback-only staff” is extremely useful when using music notation software, and is probably the best way to do it, not just when switching sounds, but when you want to simplify the expression on the score but have detailed control over the playback.
Another example is that Finale's specifications do not allow eighth note shuffles and sixteenth note shuffles to coexist during playback, but you can solve this problem by creating a playback-only staff that can shuffle both.
In a previous article, I mentioned that in Dorico, it is necessary to create a separate dummy track that does not change the numbers on the tablature in order to represent Japanese-style bends. The idea behind this dummy track is the same as above.
[All] The impact of music notation software on guitar score notation conventions
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Especially with Finale, there are often multiple ways to produce a single result, but I think the most important criterion for choosing the best method is that it is simple.
The reason is that if it is simple, there are fewer program processing problems, and it is easier to remember what you did when you created the file when you use it again after a long time.