Changing beamed figures

• Feb 18, 2011 - 09:26

Hi Everyone,

After importing a score with beamed dotted 8th-16th figures, I would like to change them to straight 8th notes (jazz style). Is there an easy way to do this for the entire score without reentering? Some programs allow the "resolution" to be changed, i.e., the minimum note duration to be specified so that the score's beamed figures are "rounded" to that value.

Moreover, if I try changing a measure manually I can't change the last note to an 8th, an unwanted rest is created which can't be deleted.

Thanks.

Attachment Size
DOTTED.GIF 1.87 KB
REST.GIF 1.87 KB

Comments

• Feb 18, 2011 - 18:40

Only way I know to do the sort of change you have in mind would be to use a separate MIDI editor that had such a capability - one that recognized dotted eighth - sixteenth rhtyhms and turned them into eighths.

As for the the last eighth rest you can't delete, you aren't *supposed* to be able to delete notes in MuseScore. You may be used to Finale (as was I), in which one often needed to delete notes or rests before replacing them. In MuseScore, that isn't necessary. If you want to repalce the eighth rest with a note, simply click the rest then type the note you'd like to see instead.

Another way of looking at the difference: in Finale, you start with an empty measure and start adding things to it, meaning that until you've entered the last note, there are fewer than four beats in the measure. In MuseScore, this does not normally happen. The measure starts out with a whole rest, and every note you enter "steals" time from that rest. The rest then adjusts to take up the rest of the measure. Similarly, if you lengthen any existing note, the next note in line shortents to make room for it. If you shorten a note, a rest is inserted to take up the slack. At least, that's the basic gist of it. It took me a little while to get used to it (it's more natural for Sibelius users, I think), but now that I am, it's at least as easy as Finale.

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• Feb 18, 2011 - 23:13

Thanks for your reply, Marc. Not encouraging... although I love the program's ease of entry, editing often seems cumbersome to impossible. For example, if I enter the attached sequence ending with a quarter-rest, then decide to place the measure first, it would apparently require complete reentry of the measure. I can't simply insert a leading rest or delete the trailing rest.

Am I correct in assuming the above, or is there a workaround?

It's not the end-of-the-world since data entry is so fast, but a few intuitive additions to the program would help immensely.

Thanks again,

Irv (nugget)

Attachment Size
Before and After.gif 3.26 KB

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• Feb 19, 2011 - 05:09

If you're trying to change the first bar (measure) in your example into the second one, you can do it as follows:

select the first note;
shift/right arrow to select the remaining 5 notes;
ctrl-x to cut;
click on the half note rest which is now at the beginning of the measure;
5 (to turn it into quarter note rests)
right arrow (to move to the second quarter note rest);
ctrl-v to paste

... which really isn't too bad, and nowhere near as time-consuming as my description. Obviously it would be much quicker than re-entry if there were many more notes to be moved. If I've misunderstood, I'm still sure you can do something similar to achieve your aim. Or there may be a simpler way - I'm fairly new to MuseScore.

I think the reason deleting and inserting beats (or part beats, such as eighth notes in 4/4) isn't supported is that it becomes complicated very quickly, as everything following the editing action logically changes - for example, if you delete a beat, all the rest of your notes to the end of the score logically have to occur a beat earlier. This is not particularly easy to achieve. The alternative would be to permit (possibly temporarily) a different time signature for the measure you are editing; but using cut and paste, it is possible to edit more than one measure at a time, and things rapidly become awkward. Or it may be feasible for MuseScore to allow you to toggle to the editing mode you have suggested, and for it to automatically cut the remainder of the score and paste it in the new position; but even if I was familiar with C++ I wouldn't much fancy programming something like that; not just the remaining notes would be affected, but the positioning of everything else - dynamics, ornaments, breaks etc. It is much simpler to only allow over-typing of beats, either with notes or rests, which is how I think of MuseScore's chosen editing model. It took me a while to get used to this, but I'm happy with it now.

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• Feb 19, 2011 - 06:34

As Jon suggests, copy&paste is your friend. The process is different, and as I said, it takes alittle while to get used to, but I'd wager that most editing operations take the same or perhaps even *fewer* steps than in Finale. Consider, MuseScore's note entry is almost exactly like Sibelius', and virtually everyone who has ever used both Finale and Sibelius would say Sibelius is easier.

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• Feb 19, 2011 - 19:32

Hello,

I am sorry to intervene in this topic, as it is focused on a slightly different problem. However, I have noticed the advice on copy-pasting and I just had to ask. Several times I have already needed to add a rest or a note to a "finished" bar (as I omitted something for instance). And I have had to delete all the entries after a particular position to be able do so. Although it has been possible to cut the entries out, it has not been possible to paste them back into a desired place.

I am attaching few png files to illustrate such a case. First, as you can see, I, having followed the original sheets, put in a double dotted crotchet at the beginning of the bar. However, very soon I realised I was not able to put all the notes into that bar (as there could be four beats only). So I changed the first crotchet into a single dotted. This, nonetheless, lead to a rest having appeared after that crotchet, a rest, which should not have been there (it would be great if the programme added the rest to the end of the bar, not in the middle of it). When I deleted the last note in the bar, the semiquaver, the rest before it became, naturally, longer, which exactly I needed, but I also needed the semiquaver. So, in the end, I had to delete all the entries after the first crotchet and enter them once more to get the desired result, which you can see in the last picture (dotted crotchet, two semiquavers, crotchet, dotted quaver rest, semiquaver). Had copy-pasting worked, I could have copied or cut the entries and pasted them instead of the undesired rest, which had appeared after the first crotchet. Am I mistaken? This case is an example only, I have experienced similar difficulties quite often.

Disclaimer: I use Musescore 1.0, rev. 3996, on Win XP HE, ver. 2002, SP 3. Yes, indeed, I have read the manual. In case I have not read it properly enough, please accept my apology for redundant inquiries.

Thanks for improving my ability to use Musescore
JR

Attachment Size
Musescore_problem-with-rests_1.PNG 74.93 KB
Musescore_problem-with-rests_2.PNG 74.19 KB
Musescore_problem-with-rests_3.PNG 74.21 KB
Musescore_problem-with-rests_4.PNG 71.47 KB

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• Feb 19, 2011 - 23:31

Hi Jon and Marc,

Thanks for your quick replies (one of the best things about MuseScore is this forum). The keystroke sequence you've recommended is clearly a fast and easy way to solve the issue, and it'll just take me more time until keystroke combinations become automatic for me.

I would still love to see a "temporary override" option that allows free-form entry and deletion in selected measures without affecting the rest of the score. I realize it feels inelegant given the well-designed entry rules of this software, but it would make revising some measures a lot easier..

I was a newbie using Sibelius but MuseScore's menus are much better designed, as is its feature set.

Thanks again,

Irv (nugget)

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• Nov 19, 2013 - 18:50

I have the same need/desire as the OP. It'd be great if MuseScore had an auto function to do this. There are a lot of scores on wkifonia written as dotted-1/8 + 1/16th, which in the jazz world would normally be written as STRAIGHT 1/8ths but played as SWING 1/8ths.

Here's how I am making the changes. Clunky at best, but FWIW.

1. Select the dotted 1/8th note. click on the "." in the toolbar, or hit "." on the keyboard. This removes the dotted, replaced by a 1/16th rest.
2. Select the 16th note, "ctrl-C" to copy it.
3. Select the 16th rest, "ctrl-V" to paste the 16th note over the 16th rest, resulting in 2 16th notes.
4. Keeping the FIRST 16th note selected, Hit "4" on the keyboard, changing the 2 16th's into a single 8th.

Yup, clunky for sure.

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• Nov 19, 2013 - 20:15

This seems an extremely specialized sort of situation to me, but indeed, when it comes in handy, it would come in *very* handy. Seems exactly the sort of thing best handled by a plugin. Not sure the 1.3 framework would support such a thing directly very well, but I'm betting it could be done for 2.0. I could be wrong on either or both counts, of course. A facility where you selected the passage, ran the plugin, and it automatically changed all dotted rhythms to not-dotted equivalents (or vice versa). Or added up the numebr of notes, divide that into the length of the passage, and made all notes values equal to that result. Lots of special case situations that could be handled this way.

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• Nov 20, 2013 - 00:13

Hi Marc,

When adapting existing tunes to jazz lead sheets, a fair number of older standards are written using dotted-eighths. It turns out that Sibelius 7 has a plugin ("Straighten Written-Out Swing") that instantly converts dotted-eighth/sixteen figures to straight eights. Not everyone has Sibelius but since I prefer MuseScore, I export the score via XML to Sibelius, then convert the dotted eighths and import it back into Musescore. It takes less than 30 seconds.

I'm hoping someone will write a similar plugin for MuseScore 2.0!

Irv

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