Shifting notes up or down but keeping the notes within key

• Oct 31, 2012 - 03:41

i'm just learning how to use keyboard entry, but i couldn't find out how to do this.

is there a way to:
- highlight a section of music using keyboard instead of the mouse?
- shift a highlighted section of music, but NOT by semitones, but instead by degrees? (ie just shifting each space to the next line and vice verca, so that if the notes were natural in the previous key signature, they still will be natural).

i see that if i press the up and down arrow keys after selecting a section with my mouse, i can shift the notes by semitones; but what i want to do is shift the notes by degrees instead.


Comments

- The usual OS shortcuts work: click a note, shift + arrow keys (or home/end) to extend selection.

- I don't know of anything like that built in, but I suppose a plugin could probably be written to do this.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

yes, but is there a way of doing this whole thing without using the mouse to click that first note? that is, suppose i'm in entering-notes mode. i wish i could just press and hold down shift and move the arrow keys [as in a word processor] to highlight notes, but that doesn't work.

so is there a way to accomplish the same thing as clicking a note to select it, without using the mouse?

In reply to by silph

.. that i can use the keyboard from the very start to select the first note. not sure if there's a quick way to "page down" through the score (vs scrolling with the mouse) but i'll have to experiment a little bit first to see.

In reply to by silph

First, you can't select regions when in note entry mode, because there is nothing you can *do* with a region while in note entry mode. Note entry mode is for, well, note entry. Operations on selection occur while *not* in note entry mode.and as you've discovered, there *is* a cursor that can be moved while not n note entry mode, so you can do many selections withno initial click if you orefer. But you may find moving the cursor to the desired start point is often slower than clicking. Left/right arrows move note by note, or measure by measure with ctrl.

As for navigation, sure, no need for mouse to do that. Mousewheel (also in conjunction with shift and ctrl) scrolls and zooms. EDIT: duh, of course, mousewheel is still techincally the mouse. As a notebook user with integrated touchpad, I tend not not think of the distinction as being mouse versus keyboard, but rather, do I have to find the right spot to click firstversus can I just scroll in single motion. Page up and page down also work to some extent.

In reply to by gurjeet

I think you are referring to what is technically called diatonic transposition. This has been requested before and I would like very much myself to see it implemented; if you search the forums for "diatonic transposition", you'll find other posts where you may add your voice, bumping them and attracting more attention to the topic.

Open source development is nice, but requires some 'shouting' to attract the attention of the actual developers!

Ciao,

M.

In reply to by Miwarre

The desired behavior is the same as what happens when a single note is dragged up or down by the pointer---except that it would apply to a whole selection, not to just one note.

If, in the current user interface, the up/down arrows move the selection by semitones, it seems it would be a regular and somewhat-expected extension to assign to the shift-up-arrow and shift-down-arrow the functions of moving the selection by scale degrees.

Another possibility would be to allow the selection to be dragged up or down by scale degrees. I don't know whether that conflicts with other behavior.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

That does help, Michael!

That seems to be what the OP of this thread wanted and seems to be what I asked for on my thread http://musescore.org/en/node/18731 . So it seems that a way should be provided to do this through the Notes-->Transpose dialog. This is a transposition within a key, whereas the existing options in that dialog are effectively transpositions between keys.

Is this feature documented anywhere?

One thing I found is that that dragging process seems to lose whatever accidentals are in the selection---anyway an accidental flat got lost when I dragged the selection.

In reply to by Odie

The behavior seems to be that:
1) dragging either a selected note or a multi-note selection transposes the notes by scale degrees, and
2) the up and down arrows transpose either a selected note or a multi-note selection up or down by semitones

In reply to by Odie

I don't see that shift-up or shift-down key presses are currently used for anything, and it seems like it would be good to give them the function of transposing the selection up or down by scale degrees. It is in a way expected, since a scale degree is usually bigger than a semitone, and the shift key is associated with making something bigger.

Since the functionality of transposing by scale degree is already present, it shouldn't be much work to just map shift-up and shift-down to that functionality.

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