EDIT: Or... check it.

P.S.: I'm not talking about Non-standard Key Signatures here. This doesn't involve that.

P.S.: Since Simplify Key didn't give the result I (or you) wanted, this is what I came up with.

Correction: 2 and -10 is what you need. For the staff style, use the standard setting. If the measures with the difference are more rare, then make the Staff Style the Other with 2, -10.

P.S.: You could use Fb as a non standard key, if you want, as long as the score won't be used in Concert View.

Here's a Staff Style Library that has Staff Styles for 3 different octaves for the Bb instruments that need to show in flats instead of sharps. This works for the Bb instruments in Concert E. If you are in Concert A, it looks like you would want to do something similar for the Eb instruments.

Zuill

That did it; thanks very much for your help, Zuill. In fact the A maj wouldn't be a problem, since the band parts would come out in a mixture of 5 & 6 sharps. The problem for me with the 6 sharps in E maj was not so much a sharps v flats issue, but having the mixture of flats and sharps in the score. Problem for brass band conductors is that we tend to 'think' in the Bb transposed key (ie. the piece is in "Brass Band Gb maj") where the Eb instruments (and the bass trom!) are the transposing ones.

Even if I had been able to figure out how to force a key signature of Fbmaj, it wouldn't have helped because the Bass Trom would still have needed to display in E maj (which wouldn't have mattered because in brass band scoring the bass trom is always thought of as the "odd" or "rogue" one ...)

Cheers all.

• It doesn't seem to matter which key is displaying when you select "non-standard" in the key sig. dialog.
  
• Non-standard will auto open a new dialog. In that next dialog, select LINEAR Key Format. Click NEXT twice to move to Format 2. (Formats zero and 1 are major and natural minor scales respectively. You cannot get 8 flats using Format 0 or 1.)
  
• With Format 2 selected, at the top, where you have the image of the key sig., use the scroll bar down to get to 8 flats. If you are feeling frisky, you can have up to 127 flats or sharps and up to 128 keys (formats).
  
• Now, do you need to define a "tonal center" or mess with any other buttons in that dialog? I'll bet you'll know. It appears that you could even take a key sig that looks familiar and change its attributes so that it behaves like a different animal.

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