Cross Staff Beaming in parts using more than two staves

Question

So I have two somewhat related questions. Firstly, is there a native way in lilypond to work with piano scores with more than two staves? I am hopefully beginning work on a project soon where I will be working with a three staff piano part, and the PianoStaff environment doesn't seem to support having more than two staves. I've been doing some setup and doing a StaffGroup with three staves seems to work fine for the most part but it does change the bracket on the side and I would like to get the curly piano style brace back.

Relatedly, is it possible to utilise cross-staff beaming within StaffGroup and not in a PianoStaff? I've tried just copying and pasting from the official documentation (here), but it doesn't seem to work. I think it's because I have my staves in the score environment rather than just writing directly into the staves as in the examples. I am working with the template from the wizard in Frescobaldi, should I change this, or am I just missing something obvious?

Answer 1

I think you must be doing something wrong if you find that you cannot fit more than two staves into a PianoStaff. It's a completely general construct and it can contain as many staves as you want. Just put three staves into the PianoStaff like this:

\new PianoStaff \with {
    instrumentName = "Piano"
}
<<
    \new Staff = "top" { ... }
    \new Staff = "middle" { ... }
    \new Staff = "bottom" { ... }
>>

You would then use \change Staff = "top", \change Staff = "middle" or \change Staff = "bottom" in your music, and it should Just Work™. (Just make sure that you change between adjacent staves. Otherwise you will probably get something unreadable 🙂.) Here's a little working example for you to play with: http://lilybin.com/prh0gd/1 .

By the way, you can even put staves of different types in it. As an example, I write some guitar arrangements of video game music, and sooner or later, I plan to put them on the Net. Hence, to "appease the crowds" that are always hungry for tabs, I also compile (among others) a version that has a PianoStaff with the standard notation staff and a TabStaff. In some places, I even have two standard staves and a TabStaff, which gives a result like this:

So, as you can see, having three staves in a PianoStaff is perfectly possible.

P. S.: I would be able to help you more if you posted a bit of code that does something else than you expect.