Editing an existing text
I am trying to edit an existing score.
If I delete a note, a rest appears instead. I cannot delete rests at all. It appears that Musescore forces the notes to add up to the time signature for a given measure while the measure is being edited which is frustrating How do I get round this automatic function?
Comments
You cannot get around this. That is the way the program is structured. Each measure must always contain the number of beats dictated by the time signature.
Notes have two properties: pitch and duration. Rests only have duration. If you 'delete' a note, you are only deleting its pitch, not its duration. The program will then replace the deleted pitch with a silence (a rest) of the appropriate duration.
If you need to print measures showing fewer beats in it than the time signature dictates, you can make rests (or notes) invisible by selecting them and then typing v. But most musicians will be confused by such notation.
In reply to You cannot get around this. by Recorder485
Obviously each measure must contain the correct number of beats once it is written. My issue is that, in editing an existing measure, I want to be able to manipulate the music as I wish.
As things stand, If I change the last note of a measure from a [crochet 1/4] to a [quaver 1/8], the program inserts a [1/8 rest] in front of the quaver. I cannot then change that rest to a note.
If I change the same [quaver 1/8] note back to a crochet, the program slurs the quaver into the next measure rather than using the exiting time allowed by the rest it just created.
This is very cumbersome.
What I'd like is to be able to do what I like while I am editing, and when completed, the program can check the integrity of my writing. But not till I'm ready for it.
Not possible?
In reply to Obviously each measure must by ricketts
If I change the last quarter note of a measure to an 8th note, I get an 8th note followed by an 8th rest, not the other way round like you describe.
If I then change that 8th note to a quarter, that rest disappears.
To turn a rest into a note, select it and enter the note name.
In reply to Obviously each measure must by ricketts
As Jojo pointed out, when you shorten the duration of a note during editing, the program will normally insert a compensatory rest after that note, not before. If you are actually experiencing the opposite behaviour, it would be useful if you posted the score here, and specify which version of MuseScore and which OS you are using. That way we can take a look at the score and see if there is anything 'broken' in it.
It can be difficult for new users of MuseScore (or score-writing programs in general) to wrap their heads around the concept of immutable time-ticks, as people composing or arranging on paper do not have this problem. You erase or scratch-out a note, and voilà! it's gone. You change a crochet to a quaver by adding a flag to it; neither the paper nor the Speedball pen will argue with you. OTOH, you will have to count the beats in the revised measure, and you will have to move the barlines following any such change as required.
However, on the computer, things are different. MuseScore cannot make those adjustments for you because it has no way of knowing what you actually want it to do. Do you want to move all the music following the shortened note back toward that note? Do you want to change the time signature of that one measure from 4:4 to 7:8? In both those cases, MuseScore provides tools for you to do this yourself, but if it tried to 'guess' what you wanted, it would be wrong at least as often as it was right. The program cannot read the user's mind.
If your trying to move all of the notes after a note forward in the score then the best way is to cut everything from the first note you want to keep to the end and paste it onto the first note you want to get rid of. Be warned that if later in the score there are tuplets being moved in this manner they CANNOT span a measure. This should only be an issue if you have a tuplet that spans more than one beat, or if you are moving the notes anything but a multiple of full beats.
Remember also that you can convert a series of consecutive rests into a single rest, or vice-versa. The duration of the period-of-silence remains the same: only the notation of that silence is changed.
Each note, when placed, is placed as a specific tone at a particular absolute point in time. Once placed, it does not move, unless you move it. Rests occupy all of the silence in-between the notes, and they, too, are each at a particular point in the song’s timeline. This is why you cannot “remove” a rest. Doing so does not move the nearby notes forward nor backward in time. Changing the manner of expressing a period of silence does not change its duration.
For example, in one little piece of music that I recently put together for a group of young people who didn’t yet read music very well, I deliberately wrote a series of quarter-note rests to correspond with a quarter- and eighth-note motif being played at the same time by the other players. So, the various parts looked similar ... they lined up ... and now the players could more easily follow-along by counting the rests on their own pages. They were all turning the pages at about the same time. Yeah, it took a little bit more paper, but it was much easier for them to read.