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Using the Stave Controls

You can find the stave control on the right hand side of the app when you are creating guitar tablature.  It is available to all users.  The Stave control is used to add new staves to your guitar tablature, determine which stave you want to edit, as well as give you options to control visibility so that the tab you are working on is always in view.  In order to make your tablature more "readable", it's good to add staves and treat them as new lines, this way it stacks nicely and is viewable on the most displays, such as desktop and mobile devices.

picture of stave controls

Append Stave to End Button

When you press the "Append Stave to End" Button, a new stave will be added to the bottom of your tablature.  However, you may find it necessary to add staves in between so we have added more controls for that.

Inserting a Stave before or after a current stave

You read this like a sentence!  You want to "Insert" (before or after) a particular stave.  Then press the 'Insert Stave" Button.  The default behavior is to act just like the "Append to Stave" button, which means to add a  new stave after the last one created.

if you expand the first select box, you will see that your choices are "After" and "Before".  The default is After.  It should be pretty obvious that "after" means inserting after the stave, and "before" means inserting the stave before the stave.

before or after select box

Once you choose Before or After, you can then select the stave you want to insert the new stave "before" or "after":

before or after what stave

Edit Stave

Opening this select box allows you to choose which stave you are currently editing.  Selecting one of the staves will shift the focus to it.

Delete Stave

Select the Stave you want to delete and press the "Delete" Button.

delete stave

Stave Visibility

This is a newly added feature that gives you more control of how you view the tab you are creating.  When you get to around 4-5 staves in your tabs, they begin to scroll off the bottom of the page, so it  is hard to use the fretboard and controls while seeing the tab you are working on.  There are three options: "from first to last", "from last to first" and "only show current":

from first to last: 

This is the default setting and shows the tabs as the will eventually be displayed, with the first stave you have created at the top, and the last stave you have created at the bottom.  This works well for the first 4 staves you  create, however it may get problematic once you get beyond this.  At this point, you should think about flipping the order with the "from first to last" or "only show current" option.

from last to first:

This reverses the order and puts the last stave you created at the top and the first stave you created at the bottom. Once you get to more than 4 staves, this is not a bad option because your last stave is now on top. If you don't like this view, your next option is to only show the stave you are working one, which is "only show current" described below.

only show current: 

This will hide al the staves except the one that you are working on, this will ensure that you will always be able to see the stave you are working on.  The only downside to this is that you may be missing the context of the staves before and after it, but if your tab is really long, this could be very helpful.