Would it be possible that a staff type for cymbals similar to that of Basses be designed for VDL2? I have 4 cymbals that don't always play unison. As you know, there is only one split part written for the bottom staff. It is cumbersome to create a ";sounds"; staff and a ";visual"; staff for the cymbal line. Thanks in advance for your response!

Unfortunately, there aren't enough keys on a keyboard to split it up to 4 cymbal players.  What I and many others do is use the mapping as is and enter the unison parts as they appear, then using the mod wheel will change the cymbal you hear for split parts (assuming you have different sized cymbals).  Then, so each player knows when to play a split part, I enter in their part number below each note similar to what you'd do with stickings.

Thank you very much. That's a great idea.

Yeah, Bill -- great idea! One other thing to note is that all VDL2 marching cymbal instruments contain [b]unison sounds[/b] as well as [b]solo sounds.[/b] When you enter any of the unison sounds, they'll normally appear on the center line of the staff. Solo sounds will appear below the center line. So if you decide to use the numbering system Bill described, it might help your players to know how the notation lays out.

What some others do is just create a second staff for printing. They'll notate all the music in the VDL2 staff (for playback), then write the actual ";splits"; and performer notes into the other staff, and simply MUTE it so it doesn't playback. It's a little extra work, but if you wait till the end, and just paste in your VDL2 notation into the print staff, it's simply a matter of assigning splits by dragging notes up or down with the mouse or arrow keys. Not too hard.

That's what I've been doing. Hence the ";visual"; staff and ";sound"; staff. Thanks anyway. Great minds think alike!