+ and - for flats and sharps

• Jul 1, 2012 - 04:36

I prefer using plus and minus for flats and sharps.( Gmi7-5 rather than Gmi7b5) As far as I know Musescore doesn't recognize this and I've been inputting it manually.

Am I correct that this style isn't recognized?

Comments

• Jul 1, 2012 - 05:42

I was always under the impression that + and - meant their mathematical equivalents; that is, add a note or subtract a note. So in the example above, I'd play a Gm7 without the 5th rather than flatting the fifth. C9+13, for example, just seems so much cleaner than C9add13; but perhaps that's just me. OTOH, I put something in front of the Kenton band twice with chord notations using + and - for add and drop, and they were played just as I intended. I'm also showing my age by admitting that.

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• Jul 1, 2012 - 08:54

I am personally familiar with the notation you have mentioned so G+ would be Gaug and G- would be Gdim, but I'm not sure whether MuseScore recognises this yet.

The guy to ask is Marc Sabatella who produced the Jazz styles for 1.2

Hopefully he will see this post.

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• Jul 1, 2012 - 16:31

MuseScore uses chordname styles (XML files) to control how chords are recognized and displayed. If you read the Handbook entry on chords, you'll see more info on this.

None of the style files shipped with MuseScore use the convention you mention, and I don't recommend it, since virtually no major publisher uses this any more, and both symbols are much more commonly used to mean other things. "-" usually means minor to most people, "+" more commonly means augmented. But if you still wish to use those symbols to mean flat and sharp, you should be able to customize on of the chordname style files to achieve that effect. Any of the styles starting with "cchords" (for "custom chords") should make a good starting point, as they have been set up to make this kind of customization relatively painless, with instructions at the top of the files.

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• Jul 2, 2012 - 01:29

You start by reading the Handbook entry on Chordnames, as I suggested earlier, to learn how to find the chord style file you are using now, and change to one of the "cchords" styles is you aren't already. The same dialog you learn about in that Handbook page will show you the actual location of the file. Open that file in a text editor and the instructions for modifying it will be found at the top of the file.

As for 1.2, you definitely *do* want to update . Yes, the default was change to nudge by 1sp, which actually is much better for rests and other items that need to be moved in that kind of increment. And even for text, it saves time when you need to move things a long ways. But just press Ctrl while nudging and you get a smaller increment, so you aren't losing anything at all. And even better, the small increment is now always exactly 0.1sp instead of some kind of arbitrary figure like it used to be. So you can get much more reliable/reproducible results. Plus of course many many bug fixes and other improvements in 1.2, including some that specifically relate to lead sheets. Also, the MuseJazz font now contains all characters needed for most European languages. Definitely, update!

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