Changing the number of lines in staffs

Unless explicitely specified, staffs consist of five lines, in accordance to the normal way of coding music scores. However, two exceptions might be preferred when using MusicTEX :

• gregorian music is often writen using staff of four lines instead of five,
• percussion music (e.g. drums, triangle) only needs one line staffs, since the pitch cannot change.

Therefore, since its version 5.00, MusicTEX allows for choosing the number of lines of the staffs of an instrument. This is done by defining the macro normalshapemediumseriesnormalshapemediumseries\stafflinesnbr — where r is the roman numeral of the wanted instrument as usual — to be the number of lines of the specific staff. For example :

\def\stafflinesii{4}