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YOU ARE HERE: HOME / VISIO CONTENT / SHAPES / EASY MUSIC NOTE PAPER WITH THE SMART STAFF SHAPE!

Easy Music Note Paper with the Smart

Sta Shape!
FEBRUARY 3, 2012 BY VISIO GUY — 13 COMMENTS

I’ve been playing around with Visio and music notation, very slowly, for some time now.

Here’s my rst o ering: a Smart Sta shape that you easily con gure with clef and key. You can
use it to print out music note paper or illustrate bits of music theory in other documents.
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My interest in music theory has been growing lately. There are several
reasons for this.

I’ve been playing my trombone in the ESME amateur orchestra in

Munich, as well as the Pullacher Blasmusik (although sadly not so
much lately…)
Since orchestral trombone parts are often dull, I like to mess around
with trumpet parts, which are written in treble clef, and transposed to B- at (whatever
that means). Trombones typically read non-transposed, Bass clef, which makes our lives
easy and allows more time for beer. But occasionally, we like a challenge too.
When my (very cute) 19-month-old daughter wakes up in the morning, her hair is messy
and curly. It reminds me of Beethoven or some other mad composer. This sets me in the
mood to invent songs in the U-Bahn on the way to work.

Since I work with Microsoft Visio so much, it seemed a good idea to combine the two interests.
I don’t think Visio will ever be a practical music-notation editing system, but it could be used
for light mark up, instructional illustration, and printing blank sheets of music note ledger
paper.

If you’re misfortunate enough to have heard of the  Circle of Fifths, you’ll know that there is an
eerie system to the way sharps and ats materialize on the musical sta for Western music.
Mother Nature at her most mysterious. All the major and minor keys contain from 0 to 7 sharps
or ats. A limited world with a set number of parameters. Perfect fodder for a Visio
SmartShape!

So I built what I call a Smart Sta . A single Visio shape that contains a clef sign, and the
appropriate number of sharps or ats. You only need to set two parameters to get the
signature you need! You can see how it works LIVE! in this video, or read the rest of the article.

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Of course the Smart Sta behaves well when you resize it:

To con gure a Smart Sta , just right-click and choose, clef, key, and whether or not you want
to display information about it:

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Note: the cascading Key menu shown above will only show up in Visio 2010 or later. Earlier
versions probably show as a single, long menu, although I haven’t checked it.

You can also con gure it using Shape Data. This is particularly useful for setting up multiple
staves at once. Just select a  whole bunch of them, then go to the Shape Data window and
make your changes there. All selected Smart Sta shapes will update simultaneously:

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If you choose the Show Key Label item, then your chosen key will display as text to the left of
the shape. You can easily move the text by pulling on the little yellow control handle in the
middle of the text block. This is great if you are illustrating key signatures for yourself or for
students.

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An obvious use for the Smart Sta shape is to create your own music note paper. The
download contains two Visio les. One con gured for US Letter-sized paper, the other for
metric A4. Here’s a sample:

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You can easily change the clef and key for all of the staves on the page at once. Just follow
these steps:

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1. Make sure the Shape Data window is visible. If it isn’t, do this:

Right-click on a Smart Sta shape
Choose Data > Shape Data
The Shape Data window should appear, usually on the left

2. Select all sta shapes:

Press Ctrl + A
Shift + Click on any shapes that aren’t Smart Sta shapes to deselect them
In the Shape Data window, change the values for Clef and Key.

3. All sta shapes should change at the same time!

Download “Smart Sta Music Note Paper”

s!Aj0wJuswNyXlhh5146CIpPjGOhMA – Downloaded 995 times – 103 B

Let’s have one last look at Ludwig Guy:

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Very nice! As a fellow sackbut player I’ve got to ask.. why no tenor and alto clefs? 🙂

I really could have used these in school. Would have made those 8AM music theory
classes a little more fun.. Great job.. 🙂

Visio Guy says

FEBRUARY 13, 2012 AT 4:33 PM

Hi Seth,

No time for a free giveaway to add tenor and alto clefs. I must say that I encounter tenor
very seldom, even though I typically play fairly high notes.

Thanks for stopping by!

Gary Gri n says

MARCH 15, 2013 AT 6:31 PM

Nice tool, thank-you. Have been thinking about musical arrangements in Visio for a while.
Now, coming across your work, I see that I can “centre-drop” your SmartSta s into larger
Visio page-sizes, add chord/note icons, and nally fan out related musical arrangement

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notes (or visual arrangement cues) around the perimeter. Are you by chance working on
building something like SmartMusicalNotes, to connect/glue to your Sta s?

Visio Guy says

MARCH 18, 2013 AT 9:20 AM

Hi Gary,

I’ve got some shapes somewhere that I started ddling with. You can move the notes up
and down, and they snap to the sta lines automatically, and add extra ledger lines as
needed. I don’t think I got as far as making half, quarter, eight, sixteenth nodes, though. This
gets tricky because of runs vs. single, dotted value notes, etc.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do much in the near future.

Charlie K says
SEPTEMBER 9, 2013 AT 8:19 PM

This is a really nice shape and a great way to produce a sta when you need one and can’t
locate music paper.

Thanks for sharing.

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Visio Music Note Paper & Smart Staff Shape

Here’s a sample of what can be done with the Smart Sta . All of these instances come from
the same shape. No need to meddle and ddle with individual clef shapes, sharp shapes and
at shapes:

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6/9/2020 Easy Music Note Paper with the Smart Staff Shape! – Visio Guy

Charlie

Miles Thomas says

FEBRUARY 20, 2014 AT 4:08 PM

If you do more than a little bit of music, you would probably be better advised to use a
proper “engraver” program (which is like a word processor for music that enforces good
musical layout rules).

The functionality leader in the “engraver”/composer market is Sibelius (for Windows or

Mac) but it’s pricey unless you qualify for an educational discount–but worth it if you work
with sheet music regularly; not least it will play back a synthesised version of what you
have written (for proo ng), or can drive/be driven by a USB or MIDI keyboard. And it has
add-ons for “OCR” of sheet music (which is good if you need to make
corrections/amendments to someone else’s music and you only have a printout–
respecting copyright of course!)

There are some lower-end “learning” packages which don’t have all the features, and some
Free open source engravers for all platforms which automate following of the layout rules,
lyrics under the staves etc.

A friend of mine has also made a Windows font (stave plus notes/clefs) to allow mocking
up of replica printed music (prior to about 1700), using ABC notation in any package (word,
powerpoint, publisher, even visio, or equivalents like openo ce). The font mimics the

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TODO
Ideas for improvements:

Add tenor and alto clef signs

Option to hide clef, since that is sometimes only needed on the rst line.
Option to hide the key signature (as opposed to switching to C-major) for non- rst lines.
Built-in common time-signature
Option to hide time-signature (again, after the rst line)
Connections for joining mid-line changes.

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Comments

Seth_J says
FEBRUARY 13, 2012 AT 4:26 PM

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misalignments on the staves in printed music in that period (since each note was
incorporated into a segment of the stave)

Visio Guy says

FEBRUARY 25, 2014 AT 11:42 PM

I played with MuseScore a bit and was quite astounded at what you could get for free.

I still feel like that for quick notation mock-ups, Visio has potential. Armed with a good,
usable set of shapes, and keyboard shortcuts for panning, zooming and duplicating, you
can move quite rapidly. But there’s no playback, no automatic over ow onto the next line,
etc.

karininwinnipeg says
SEPTEMBER 18, 2014 AT 1:15 AM

Hey Chris!! Oh, sorry, Ludwig!

Very nice. I happened across your site because I’m looking for some Visio solutions for
some clients. Nice to see some trombone stu on a Visio page. Great that you are still
playing.

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I encountered so much alto and tenor clef last year, I was almost inclined to pick up my old
Blazevich clef studies. (Almost.)

You might not recognize me by may married name, so I’ll sign this with the name you know
me by from high school.

Take care,
Karin Clavadetscher (now Carlson)

Visio Guy says

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014 AT 8:09 AM

Hi Karin,

Thanks for stopping by!

I used my Surface Pro in big band rehearsal the other day, it worked fantastically!

Check out On the Road with Surface Pro 3

karinincanada says
OCTOBER 7, 2014 AT 7:59 AM

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Hi Chris! Started reading your adventure with Surface and bookmarked it for later. I have an
Asus Windows 8.1 tablet (the “real” Windows, not the Metro/Modern-only). I just got
another tablet, an iPad Air, because I legitimately need it for an Accessibility class I’m
teaching.

I haven’t had the guts to take only the tablet with me on trips – freezing issues (the screen,
not the temperature). I’m hoping the next upgrade to Windows 10 might x that.

One big purpose of mine is to have charts on my tablets. I guess that’s in the rest of your
story, which I’ll have to nish tomorrow *yawn*.

Later.

Visio Guy says

OCTOBER 7, 2014 AT 9:10 AM

Hi Karin,

Sony has an e-paper reader that is PDF only, is bigger than the Surface Pro 3 that is
intriguing. It’s light and slightly exible, so there would be less worry about people
knocking it o the stand

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I strap my Surface to the stand right now and am a bit nervous the whole time–but at least
I can draw in SketchBook Pro while the strings are working on something…

Anyway, the Sony DPT-S1 is going to have really great battery life, but it needs ambient
light, like real paper. It is quite expensive–it just got *reduced* to US$900 I think–but
printing out all those charts costs money and takes a lot of time as well.

Here’s one video review of it: Sony DPT-S1 vs Microsoft Surface Pro 3 – PDF Editing and
Viewing.

I’ve only seen one music-related comment about this thing, and the guy said it was too
slow at page turning, and you couldn’t hook a USB pedal/page-turning device into it. But I
think that guy was a piano player and probably had LOTS of notes and pages, whereas
trombone charts for big band are probably 1-3 pages, so maybe it’s less of an issue.

BinaryNerd says
FEBRUARY 13, 2016 AT 9:06 AM

Hi Ludwig van Visio Guy

Love your music notation pages. I was hoping you’d added Alto and Tenor clef in the years
since I rst downloaded your SmartSta template, as my kids have taken up strings, and
Viola uses Alto clef.

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Is there perhaps a paid version of your Smart Sta template with these less-commonly
used clefs? Even something without the key signatures would be a great start…

Thanks

Visio Guy says

FEBRUARY 24, 2016 AT 9:14 AM

Hi BN,

…and I just bought an alto trombone too! But I mostly read bass clef anyway.

I just haven’t had the time to expand this thing, although I’ve wanted to for a long time.

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