Different voices, same instrument

• May 27, 2016 - 18:33

[EDIT: After changing my search terms I see that this same question has been asked about 32,768 times previously. But I can't see a way to delete my question, so I'll just leave it here in case there has been any new development on this front]

I'm using MuseScore 2.0.3 for Linux to generate learning tracks for my barbershop quartet. And thanks so much for including a barbershop template!

Anyhow, the way a learning track works is you play the part you want to learn louder than the other three parts, and/or omit that part so you can sing along with the other three.

WIth the barbershop template it was easy to figure out how to write each part to the separate voices, but it seems that the instrument selection goes with the entire staff comprising two voices, rather than each voice separately. As a result I can make the treble clef quieter but both the baritone and bass parts are the same instrument and volume on the bass clef.

Am I doing something wrong, or is that just the way it is supposed to work?

I suppose I could create four separate staves for four "voice 1" instruments, one voice per staff, but that would make the printout unreadable.

Would love to hear from anyone else who has solved this problem.

Comments

Isaac Weiss

• May 27, 2016 - 21:56

A future version of MuseScore may support the ability to control voices independently in the Mixer (no guarantees, though). For the moment, you can use the Selection Filter to select one voice at a time, and use the settings for Velocity in the Inspector to change the volume.

[DELETED] 5

• May 30, 2016 - 11:19

It's hacky but you can always manage to do something... See attached file.

The details to create such a score.

Create a score for SATB closed
Save to mscx
Open with an editor and add one more channel for each part (Alto and Bass). I also renamed the existing channel to Soprano and Tenor. Save the file and reopen it in MuseScore.
Add a staff text in the on first staff, right click it > Staff text properties. Make sure that voice 2 uses Alto
Add a staff text in the on second staff, right click it > Staff text properties. Make sure that voice 2 uses Bass
Done. Add some notes, check the mixer, where you can now change the volume of each voice separately.

Limitations:

There is no UI to add channels to an instrument. Only way is to hack the mscx or instruments.xml
This only work with staff text currently, there is no way to assign different channel to different voice right from the start. Said differently, there is one instrument per part object.
As a consequence, the names of the instrument in the mixer are ugly and cannot be changed since they are for part name.

Attachment	Size
Barber.mscz	7.73 KB

Jojo-Schmitz

• May 30, 2016 - 17:08

Very clever, I like it. Can get embedded in a template

[DELETED] 5

• May 30, 2016 - 19:16

Not it can't. Or at least not in a nice way. The user will still have to add texts which is not good. We should have the ability to add a channel, and map it to a voice right from the start but that require some UI work.

kuwitt

• May 30, 2016 - 19:53

Sometimes I wished something like an intern text editor would be useful in an advanced desktop environment. But I'm not sure if this would be implementable and would really make sense, because something like that would bring more confusion than solution ;-)

And I'm aware the focus of correcting bugs should have a bigger attention.

Jojo-Schmitz

• May 30, 2016 - 21:06

Well, it is not an excellent solution for 3.0, but a decent workaround for 2.0.