Concert Pitch Causes Undesired Accidentals

• Apr 28, 2012 - 14:34

I am a brand new user of Musescore and am quite impressed. I use Smartscore Pro for its' scanning and find it to be quite a good program but lacking in some engraving capability and also its development seems stagnant.. I also have Finale PrintMusic and perhaps I haven't given it a fair chance, I find its UI and logic to be, well, illogical and confusing.

I imported a XML file from Smartscore into Musescore and it worked very well. The score is for saxophones and I was pleased to see a Concert Pitch button. It put the score into concert pitch but when I reverted to the transposed pitches I ended up with double flats and distasteful notes like Cb for B natural. Is this normal and if so, is there an easy way to avoid it?

Thanks.


Comments

In reply to by xavierjazz

The transposition performed by the Concert Pitch button is always literal/correct. So if Cb is the correct note (eg, the fourth scale degree in the key of Gb), then Cb is what you will get, and it's *usually* a mistake to change that, as it will make it look like there are unnecessary accidentals. But indeed, there are certain situations, not that uncommon, in whch it can make sense to lie about the spelling of notes. There is no way to get the Concert Pitch facility to do that automatically each time you toggle it, but you should might able to permanently change the spell of notes (in both concert and written pitch keys) by actually transposing the score (notes->transpose) and choosing the option to respell pitches. Not sure exactly how that would work, but it could be worth a try.

The manual alternative is indeed to select the individual notes you want to change and then hit up arrow followed by down arrow.

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