Understanding Tracks, Staves, and Parts

It is important to understand how Composer defines these three terms: tracks, staves, and parts. The three terms are closely related, yet they have distinct meanings in Composer, and are used extensively in Composer's user interface. For example, Composer's main menu includes a Track menu and a Part menu.

The following excerpt from the string section of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture: illustrates the relationships between tracks, staves, and parts. The remainder of this topic explains these terms.

The above example illustrates:

     two systems on a page of the string section from the conductor's score

     four staves per each system, for Violin 1, Violin 2, Cello, and Contrabass

     the Violin 2 part extracted from the conductor's score

Track

A track is a storage area within a song, that collects all of the notes and musical performance details (such as volume level and pan) that are associated with a distinct instrumental or vocal part. You can view a list of all of the tracks in a song by using the Track Setup command in the Track menu.

The most important attributes of a track are:

     the MIDI device that plays the notes for the track,

     the MIDI bank and patch of the MIDI device that determines what kind of instrument sound is used to play the notes for the track, and

     the MIDI channel of the MIDI device that is assigned to the performance of the track.

A track is not so much a musical concept as it is a technical concept defined by software, such as Composer, that needs to store the separate performances of different instruments in a song file. If you have ever worked with a MIDI sequencer program, then you will already be familiar with the concept of track. Composer defines a track exactly the same way that any MIDI sequencer program defines a track.

If you have not previously worked with a MIDI sequencer program, then you can think of a track roughly as the "part" of a score that is assigned to a particular instrument or voice, or an instrument group in an orchestra (such as violins) or a section of a choir (such as sopranos). It is important to understand, however, that Composer assigns a special meaning to the term "part", as discussed below.

Staff

A staff is one "line" of music for a track, as displayed on the page of a score. In a score, a "line" of music that is simultaneously played by one or more instruments for vocalists with distinct parts is called a "system". A given track usually has as many staves as there are systems in the score. The exception is the case where no staff is displayed if the track has no notes and lyrics for a given system, and if the Hide Empty Staves option is in effect for that track.

Part

In Composer, a "part" displays the notes for one or more tracks. A part can be formatted and paginated independently of other parts extracted from the conductor's score.

Composer's definition of part has a meaning that is more specific that the usual definition of part in the vocabulary of musicians. In usual music vocabulary, a part refers to the portion of a score that is played by a particular instrumentalist or vocalist, or by a group of musicians in an ensemble that are playing or singing the same notes. Also, in usual music vocabularly, a part can refer to the physical copy of music that is read by a musician during a performance. Composer's definition of part is more like this second meaning of part: the separate copy of music that has only the notes played by a particular instrument or sung by a particular singer or choir section.

In Composer, you can temporarily display the staves for just one particular track, such as for the Violin 2 section of an orchestral piece, or the lead guitar part for a four member rock band. You can choose special formatting options for the display of that particular part. You can also control the page breaks and system breaks (at particular measures) for that particular part. You can assign a name to that part and later recall it, so that only the tracks assigned to that part are displayed, and the saved formatting options and pagination for that part are restored.

A part can include two or more tracks. For example, a conductor's part would include all of the instrument "parts" (tracks) of the score. You can separately format and paginate the conductor's part. For example, you might want to use a different paper size or orientation (landscape) for the conductor's score, and use a smaller font size.

Another example of a part with multiple tracks is a piano or keyboard part which has one track for right-hand notes and another track for left-hand notes. Typically, a MIDI file has only a single track for a keyboard part. However, if you use Composer's Split Hands command, then the keyboard track will be separated into a pair of right-hand and left-hand keyboard tracks. Composer automatically creates a named keyboard part for these two new tracks.

One of the powerful features of Composer, which you will not find in other music notation programs, is that all "extracted" parts of a score remain perfectly synchronized with the full conductor's score. If you add a note for, say, the Violin 2 part in the conductor's score, it will also be added in the separately extracted, formatted and paginated Violin 2 part. Conversely, if you are viewing the Violin 2 part, and add a note to it, the next time you view the conductor's part, you will see that the note was added there also.

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