Instrument name display

In music with many instruments, it’s handy to display the instrument names to the left of each stave. By default, we don’t display these names, but you can turn them on via our editor.

To do this on any slice you’ve created, go to the slice notation settings and look for the “Display instrument names in notation?” section:

The options are:

• No — instrument names aren’t shown.
• Yes, only in first system
• Yes, in every system

A system is a essentially a “row” of music, aka single printed line of music before a line break.

Names and abbreviated names

In the first system, we’ll display each instrument’s full name. In subsequent systems, we’ll use each instrument’s abbreviated name, which you can set by editing the instrument. If an instrument doesn’t have an abbreviated name set, we’ll use the full name.

What’s the point of abbreviated names? It’s just to simplify the display. In choral music, for example, it’s common to display instrument names like this:

• In the first system: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass
• In subsequent systems: S, A, T, B