Tablature: Allow dragging of mouse for fret position while clicked

• Sep 26, 2019 - 22:14
Reported version
3.2
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

There have been suggestions to add (years back) a guitar neck for tablature input. That'd be pretty nice, but here is another suggestion that should facilitate tablature input to some degree:

As it currently is, using the mouse to add a note adds merely a 0 to the current position of currently selected duration. The user then must press up/down or use the fret shortcuts to change the pitch. What is suggested here is this:

When pressing the mouse to insert a tab note on a tablature staff, also allow the user to drag up or down while still holding down the main mouse button to variate the fret degree (it would have to be smooth but not too slow). This could be very useful for mouse-heavy users of tablature scoring.


Comments

Bump. Slightly surprised no one else has added a request for this, but maybe I'm in the minority. Then again this is in the issue tracker and not on the general forums.

In reply to by cadiz1

Yes that does looks nice. Haven't got around to testing it yet though. Hopefully the links can be of some use to someone who comes across this.

The bump is in reference to the ability to mouse-drag when instantiating a fret on a tablature-staff so that the user can increase/decrease rather than be confined to 0.

It's an idea, but are you convinced it could be easy and fast ? For example, fret 9, you would have to go through all the intermediate steps with the wheel? For a full score, you're going to spend hours. And why not just hit the right key on the right fret as right now?

In reply to by cadiz1

Yeah, all the intermediate steps, but if done well it wouldn't be a bother in my opinion. It sounds like some people are mouse-heavy users for regular notation (I'm not), and maybe it would suit them well to have this functionality?

My problem right now though is that after changing my shortcut preferences, if I try to get fret #'s to work MS tells me that the shortcut conflicts with other keys. Like if "1" is linked to 16th note, when I try to add 1 to fret #1 it won't let me do it. Maybe there's some workaround by putting it hand-coded in the xml but I haven't tried it. Actually, this seems to be a bug to me since "Tab Only" shortcuts should allow for conflicts with non-tab shortcuts. Because of this, I haven't figured out how to get keyboard shortcuts for tabs+regular notation to work well together. Of course I could try to make two different XML files and try to load one or the other depending on when working on tab or regular notation, but that seems kind of lame.

I can't even use [Up/Down] for selecting string position because I use Up/Down for octave up/down and it collides for some reason when trying to set it. It actually is set already and shows so in the preferences, but it doesn't do anything. Maybe I should file some issue tracker problems.

"if I try to get fret #'s to work MS tells me that the shortcut conflicts with other keys. Like if "1" is linked to 16th note, when I try to add 1 to fret #1 it won't let me do it."
Well, you are mistaken. You should not enter the fret numbers via the numeric keypad (this is to change the note values, of course, whether in TAB or standard notation), but via the alphanumeric part of the keyboard (the row of numbers above the letters).

And for keyboard shortcuts, you have to go to the Tablature part of the handbook. There's a whole series of them: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/tablature#mouse

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

My regular notation duration shortcuts were changed to custom alpha-numerics, but in order to change them in the past, I vaguely remember having to take off the TAB-only shortcuts because they conflicted (alpha-numerics). MuseScore is weird in that it declared there to be a conflict, yet, after resolving the conflict by erasing the conflicting shortcut, setting it up with whatever else, then changing the previously emptied shortcut to default, it ends up working. Most of the time. I just checked with the alpha-numerals and now they work after resetting them all to default "after" having manually changing regular notation shortcuts.

But the up/down still doesn't work even though it shows that it should. I.E., I changed regular notation up/down to be something else besides regular [up/down], and now the shortcut for string-tab up/down doesn't work even though it shows [up/down] is assigned to it. If I attempt to clear those and manually set it to [up/down], I get a conflict with my regular notation shortcuts.

I suppose that's an entirely different issue in itself. If anything, I've got tabs working well with numerics on alpha-keys after having cleared them to have my custom regular duration settings and then re-assigning afterwards.