Special tracks

Not every track is a six-string guitar. alphaTab detects drum kits, percussion staves, keyboards, and alternate tunings and renders each with the convention its instrument expects.

Drum notation

Drum tracks are the five-line staves that show a kit part with piece-specific noteheads — x-heads for cymbals, normal heads for toms, slashed heads for the snare — so a drummer can identify each piece without a legend. alphaTab hides the tab staff on drum tracks because it carries no useful information.

Percussion multi-line staves

Percussion tracks other than the full kit render on staves with one, two, three, or five lines, matching the number of distinct pitches the part uses — the single-line staff for a shaker, the five-line staff for a mallet part. Each line maps to a percussion instrument defined in the source file.

Piano grand staff

Piano tracks render as a grand staff — treble clef above, bass clef below, joined by a brace. The brace is the curly SMuFL glyph that ties the two hands into a single instrument. Voices split across the two staves as the source file specifies.

Unusual tunings and multi-track tuning display

Alternate tunings — drop D on a rock rhythm guitar, DADGAD on a Celtic fingerstyle line, open G on a slide part, or seven- and eight-string layouts on metal charts — render with the string pitches listed above the first system. Every track shows its own tuning, so a multi-track score with mixed tunings stays legible.

Show it in code

The instrument-specific rendering is automatic — alphaTab reads the track's channel and staff configuration from the source file. To hide the tuning label above a stringed track, flip the GuitarTuning element off:

import * as alphaTab from '@coderline/alphatab';

const container = getAlphaTabContainer();
const api = new alphaTab.AlphaTabApi(container, {
  core: { file: '/scores/song.gp' },
  notation: {
    elements: new Map([
      [alphaTab.NotationElement.GuitarTuning, false],
    ]),
  },
});

getAlphaTabContainer() is a placeholder for the platform-specific render target.

Where to look next

• Drum and percussion notation — deeper coverage of the drum staff itself.
• Multi-track and grand staff — how alphaTab lays out several tracks together.
• Tuning display — the stylesheet knobs that control where the tuning label lives.
• Bracket extend mode — how the accolade groups mixed-instrument tracks.
• Toggling notation elements off — hide any category globally.
• notation.elements — the settings entry point for the element map.
• NotationElement — the enumeration of togglable elements.