Per Kurt Stone, breath tones (on woodwinds or brass) with no pitch content should preferably be written on a separate tablature line above the staff, using circular noteheads. Aside from their shape, these noteheads are unusual in that the stem extends through the notehead (see example below, engraved with Sibelius).
I've tried several approcahes, none of which work:
1. Create a 6-line staff, respacing the top line up a couple of spaces from the customary top line. The advantage here would be in the simplicity of getting pitches onto the tablature line. This solution, however, causes the following problems:
a) the time signature is vertically offset upwards, so as to be centered between the (offset) top staff line and the bottom (6th) line;
b) any pitches needing leger lines will appear above the tablature line, which is inappropriate.
2. Create a separate, single line staff, on which all breath tones are placed. This solution seems the most sensible, but starting and stopping the tablature staff (as shown above) is difficult. (Or at least beyond my current abilities!)
3. Engrave a line when needed using draw-line as part of a markup command. This seems to be the most flexible, but suffers from the following problems:
a) the line will automatically offset to avoid collisions, thus rendering it impossible to place noteheads on the line
b) figuring out the coordinates for placing the line is not terribly intuitive
On top of these issues is the need to create a new, circular notehead, which preferably would default to the placement relative to the stem shown above, i.e. centered on the stem, with the stem protruding through the notehead. Since I have other fonts with a pre-existing circular notehead, it would be easiest if this could just be imported in and used as a notehead, although I suspect (after perusing the manual, forum, etc.) that this might not be possible.
Does anyone have any advice?
Many thanks!
EF