Overhaul of templates for MuseScore 2
I am just about to embark on an overhaul of the templates for MuseScore 2
Currently we have:-
Carol
Chamber Orchestra
Choir SATB
Choir SATB with Piano
Concert Band
Guitar Tab
Hymn
Jazz Big Band
Jazz Combo
Jazz Lead Sheet
Lead Sheet
Piano
UK Brass Band
I suggest that we remove Carol as I think it was entirely associated with the iOS Christmas Songbook launched 18months or so ago and effectively seems to duplicate Lead Sheet.
What other changes need to be made?
Ideas for deletions or additions would be welcome.
Also - is there a reason why they are mscx files and not mscz files?
In addition I suggest that the "Create Score from Template" button is the default selection in the Create Score dialogue rather than "Create score from scratch".
Ultimately I would be nice to present a graphical interface for Template selection, but I suspect that will be for a future version.
Comments
One Thing I noticed with the SATB template: it doesn't seem to be using the range definitions of these voices.
Also a having a closed score SA/TB template would be nice
Having them as mscx is IMHO better for GIT, changes to the templates are then easy to manage and spot
In reply to One Thing I noticed with the by Jojo-Schmitz
I have actually just put the proper ranges in, but haven't sent in a pull request yet
I would like to see two simple templates. Especially, if templates would become the default.
1/ Treble clef (piano sound, full ambitus)
2/ Bass Clef (piano sound, full ambitus)
I agree with jojo that a closed SA/TB would be great. Maybe one with piano or organ too.
A Rock/pop template? Voice, backing vocal, Guitar lead, Rythmic guitar, bass, drums?
Also take a look to Musescore.com where some people posted templates. http://musescore.com/sheetmusic?text=template
Oh and a quick look to the competition can help. Sibelius comes with 60 templates. See the full list page 30 in their handbook (30MB PDF).
Last point, Thomas is working with a student, Manan, to be able to download updated and new translations once Musescore 2.0 will be released. Depending how well and fast this development will be done, we could imagine to extend it to other resources, such as templates (or soundfont, or plugins etc...)
FWIW, I updated Jazz Lead Sheet for 2.0 a few weeks ago as part of my chord symbol work. I ended up completely recreating the template from scratch in 2.0 rather than trying to convert the 1.X template. I wanted to be sure to have the opportunity to take advantage of any new defaults for existing settings, make conscious choices on any new settings, etc. Since it uses only one unnamed instrument that has no specific playback expectations, there probably isn't anything that needs to be done as far as updating it with respect to instrument.xml.
For this template, since there is only the one instrument, it is mostly about the style settings. My plan was to then recreate Jazz Combo and Jazz Big Band from scratch as far as the instrument layout and scaling are concerned, then copy over most the style settings from Jazz Lead Sheet (by exporting to MSS and importing) and doing final hand-tuning from there.
So if you're saying instruments.xml is now to the point where this makes sense, I'm happy to take those two on, and it would kind of pointless for you to update the instrument stuff yourself, since I'm going to want to recreate them from scratch as part of the update anyhow.
As for MSCX versus MSCZ, I would say I personally have a preference for MSCX. Easier to tweak manually, easier to track in GitHub. At one time, there was talk about MSCX going away, and that may be why the "Jazz" templates I created got added in MSCZ format whereas the older ones were MSCX. I'd actually like to change the "Jazz" templates to MSCX, and unless someone objects, I'll probably do that when I do the update.
Oh, and I personally would also like to see use of templates become the default in the new score wizard, but I recognize this might not be popular. I'd be more comfortable with this if, once one got to the screen with the list of templates and decided none fit, there was a button to skip template selection and create from scratch without having to find the "back" button and change an option you didn't remember having set in the first place.
In reply to FWIW, I updated Jazz Lead by Marc Sabatella
Is the Jazz lead sheet simply a standard lead sheet using the Jazz font supplied with MuseScore?
Or is there more customisation?
Incidentally I would appreciate some guidance regarding the best default chord definitions to use with the Lead Sheet template. What would you consider the most widely used??
I do believe templates should 'make things easier', most especially for a beginner. However, in one particular case, a template's 'unconventional' default settings caused some difficulty, as OP stated: "All this time and trouble shouldn't be necessary for such a simple task."
Have a look at:
http://musescore.org/en/node/21535#comment-80979
So, are two flavors of 'lead sheets' necessary? Had the poster used 'Jazz Lead Sheet', the problem would not have occured.
If the 'Template' button is to be the default, then a 'problematic' template should not be one of the choices.
My idea of a lead sheet is one staff (treble clef) notating melody, also including chord names, lyrics. Clef and key signatures on all staves.
Regards..
In reply to Templates by Jm6stringer
I will certainly be looking into that one - thank you for drawing it to my attention.
In reply to Templates by Jm6stringer
Well, there *are* two very different varieties of lead sheet out there in the real world, so I think removing one of the template would be a mistake. The thread you are talking about came about because someone made the mistake of choosing the wrong one, and that's somewhat unavoidable (but would be improved if each template came with a thumbnail, as I've advocated elsewhere). But if we removed one of the two template, then everyone who *wanted* that style would be forced to deal with. not just because of their own mistake, but because we would have removed support for something they found useful.
What are these two types of lead sheets, you ask?
One kind is designed for readability, where you make everything big and spacious and place at most one song per page, with some songs taking two (or more) pages. These lead sheets are often either done by hand or produced in a hand-written style. The chord symbols themselves are often oversized even relative to the fairly large print size overall. The "Real Book" and "New Real Book" series of fakebooks are the most well-known examples of this in the jazz world, and that's what the "Jazz Lead Sheet" template tries to emulate.
The other type of lead sheet is the one the old "Lead Sheet" template is trying to emulate - the style of those big books with tiny print that try to cram as many tunes as possible in, often two or three to a page, including cases where a tune starts at the bottom of one page and continues to the top of the next. These are almost typeset with everything in Roman font, and the chord symbols are tiny even in comparison to the fairly small overall print size, although fretboard diagrams are often included as well.
Those are the basic styles these template are trying to deal with. One could of course quibble whether the specifics of settings made in either of them are expect. Personally, I think both should default to having clefs and key signatures and to make the user *choose* to omit them. But I think we need to keep both templates, and each should suit the needs of the users who choose them. We can't be in the business of making it harder to make bad choice by also making it harder to make *good* choices.
In reply to Well, there *are* two very by Marc Sabatella
OK, I understand about the different fonts, chord styles, etc. contributing to the 'look' of the lead sheets.
I guess I am really questioning the default behavior of the 'Lead Sheet' template - in Style / Edit General Style / Page. The clefs and key signatures boxes are unchecked - which is different from 'Jazz Lead Sheet'. This is what caused and, ultimately resolved, the problem:
http://musescore.org/en/node/21535#comment-81037
So then, as suggested, why not use the same clef/key signature default settings for each of the lead sheet templates? Those who are savy enough to read lead sheets without clefs and key signatures should not be confused by their presence and, if necessary, could always edit them away.
Indeed, I have seen the two mentioned styles of lead sheets and I do believe that in the majority of cases, clefs and key signatures appear on every line.
This way the unsuspecting user can load either 'lead sheet' template and proceed with some functional consistency, thereby preventing the 'grief' visited upon fellow poster bandmagic.
Regards...
In reply to Going for the 'look'... by Jm6stringer
Sensible defaults will be added once I get on to it.
I suspect the author of the Lead Sheet template was influenced by the now deprecated Real Book in house style of only having a clef and key signature at the start of the song.
This was, of course, done to save on writing time, as these were produced long before we had anything like MuseScore to play with :)
For anyone classically trained it was a problem anyway.
In reply to Sensible defaults will be by ChurchOrganist
Yes, and the irony is, nothing else about the Lead Sheet template mimics the "Real Book" look - the template uses tiny staves rather than slightly oversized ones, Roman font rather than MuseJazz, tiny chord symbols, etc. In all other respects, the Lead Sheet template is based on those "801 Favorite Pop Songs" types of fakebooks than on the Real Book, and those fakebooks usually *do* use clefs and key signatures. So yes, I vote add the clefs and key signatures to the Lead Sheet template.
BTW, if you load a 1.X score into 2.0, its chord style (Style / General / Chordname) will be set to "custom", with the old 1.X chord description file attached. So if you do update termplate by loading them directly then changing settings, you should visit Style / General / Chordname and change the chord style from "Custom" to "Standard" (or "Jazz" in the case of the "Jazz" templates).
In reply to Yes, and the irony is, by Marc Sabatella
So if you do update template by loading them directly then changing settings
Please, don't do that. If anyone wants to contribute templates, please create them from scratch. And it's not limited to ChurchOrganist. If someone wants to create the Jazz Leadsheet template because he feels more entitled to do it (Marc?), go ahead. Regarding the inclusion of it, if you feel it's debatable (because it's special, because it was not there before etc... it's good to discuss the template on this forum first, and/or to argument for the inclusion in the pull request.
Also it would be good to wait for Werner's green light or commitment that the file format will not change before the release, or we will have to redo all the templates. So it's good to talk about it, and plan which style etc... we want in each template but let's wait for this green light before pushing anything in the nightlies.
In reply to So if you do update template by [DELETED] 5
To be clear - the Jazz Lead Sheet template *already* exists - we added it for 1.1. And I already updated it for 2.0, by recreating it from scratch, as described above, as part of the pull request where we enabled WYTIWYG mode for chord symbols. So no worries there - this one is a done deal, except the possibility of changing it from MSCZ to MSCX and the possibility of needing to update it if anything changes before release. I did the initial pass at an update to make it easier for people to try out the new chord symbol stuff, but I deliberately left the other Jazz templates (Combo & Big Band) alone as I kind of figured things were still not entirely settled. I'm perfectly content to continue waiting.
In reply to So if you do update template by [DELETED] 5
Very sensible
You may have already seen Lasconic's announcement about the first Beta of MuseScore 2 coming soon.
This means that we need to crack on with templates now.
There is a list of what we need here http://musescore.org/en/node/17386#comment-120326
If there are any templates you can provide, please say so either here or on the issue tracker thread.
We are making it standard practice to save them in .mscx format as that is easier to handle on Git
Attached is a zip file containing the few I managed to knock out before going to a rehearsal tonight.
Please try them out and make any adjustments you think necessary - I shall be putting them in a pull request tomorrow morning, so any tweaks should be done through your Github account with a pull request.