Need help with the NYT strand today? Frankly, I'm not surprised, as I found it to be quite a bit more technical than previous puzzles, which suggests that the NYT is increasing the difficulty level.

Below, we have compiled some helpful hints and what-if answers for Strand #54. Please read on if you need a little help, as we will start with a few hints and then lead you to the full solution to Strands #54.

WARNING: There are spoilers for Strands #54.

The official theme for NYT Strands #54 is... "Staff Members."

And here's an unofficial tip from me: music to my ears:

If you're still in the dark, here are some handy words that will give you valuable hint tokens:

Still struggling? Spangram gives you a hint on conjunctions. Today begins with 'n' and ends with 'n'.

Scroll down to see what it is.

NOTATION.

Now, what's the answer to today's strand?

Drumroll, please.

... Spangram was NOTATION.

Hints used: 2.

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💡🔵

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Very difficult today. The clues are also deliberately misleading: from the word "staff" I looked for words like TEMP and MANAGER.

(If you still don't understand the link, "staff" refers to the horizontal line on the sheet music.)

In fact, when I finally wrote my first answer on the board, it was by accident. When I write this column, I start by looking for the wrong word to buy hints for the section above. So I didn't expect the word SHARP to actually be filled in.

The same was true for NATURAL, which I found later. Since I couldn't figure out the connection between the two, I ended up having to use a hint, which gave me FLAT. When that didn't work, I tried the clue again and got CLEF (I was angry because I had already tried CLEFT and failed)

Now I knew the theme and that NOTATION was a spangram from bottom to top. But even so, I still had a hard time remembering the terms in the score.

Eventually, I managed to dig up MEASURE and SIGNATURE. The only thing left is REST, which I plan to do after the absolute agony of this puzzle.

Are you reading this late in the day? The full text of Strand's solution to yesterday's Round 53 can be found here.