Place dynamics and hairpins above vocal staves by default

The way I would see it working is, somewhere in Staff Properties would be a button that brought up a version of the general & text style dialogs that had all the values shown grayed out or otherwise indicating they were set to defaults, but you could still change settings. So changes made here would override the score default, but other settings would stay linked to the score default.

It would be a pretty significant change in the code to support this - we'd basically be adding a parameter to the functions that look up style to require a specific staff as wel, and these functions are used lots of places - but the compiler would be happy enough to tell us where we need to make the change, and the change would normally be easy enough. So more time-consuming than difficult, I think.

It’s really annoying to have to move *every* *single* dynamic from below the notes (overlapping the text!) to above, so *please* implement this soon!

It is implemented in the nightly builds and with that for the next major release already, there you can quite easily switch dynamics and hairpins to show below or above staff.
It is not a (score or staff) style setting though, just an individual setting

Even in the current release though, you certainly don't have to move dynamics individually. You can select them all at once and apply a custom style or move them with the Inspector. Or use a custom palette.

Also, if your score is *only* for vocal, not vocal and instrumental mixed, you can simply alter the Text Style for dynamics so the default is above.

If you need help learning how to do these things, please ask in the Support forum. You definitely don't want to be moving *every* *single* dynamic one at a time; MuseScore already provides several *much* more efficient methods.

These days MuseScore has an option to put individual dynamics above the staff (select them and press 'X'), but it would be nice to not have to do this on vocal staves.

Dynamics and hairpins always go above a single staff that has a single set of lyrics, so we should definitely cover this case.

There are some other cases to consider:

1. Vocal staff with no lyrics
   • Neptune from Holst's The Planets is the only example I know of.
   • Here the sings are basically being used as instruments so dynamics should arguably go below the staff, but it's debatable and the case is extremely rare anyway.
2. Vocal staff with lyrics above and below.
   • This happens occasionally where two voice parts (e.g. Sopranos and Altos) are written on a single staff but have a slightly different rhythm.
   • It's usually a temporary thing and is unlikely to coincide with a dynamic marking.
   • If it did coincide you might put the dynamic above and below too, but again, it's debatable (unless the dynamic is different for each part).
3. A grand staff with a single set of shared lyrics between the staves.
   • This usually occurs in songbook scores where lyrics are shown on the piano's grand staff, in which case dynamics should be done as for the piano.
   • It might occasionally be used as a space-saving device between ordinary vocal staves, in which case the dynamics should also be shared between the staves.

We could attempt to deal with some of these cases with logic like "if the note has a lyric below, put the dynamic above", but they are probably don't occur often enough to be worth the effort.

And a Closed Score SATB, 2 instruments (women and men), lyrics between staves. There for women dynimcs should go above, for men below

@Jojo-Schmitz, that's the case I was referring to in 3b (space-saving device), but you're right that most people would probably notate this with 2 instruments rather than a single grand staff. Having lyrics on both staves (above the top and below the bottom) probably makes more sense than having on set in the middle, but it would be good to see examples of this.

If we want to handle this case automatically then using a grand staff is easier from a developers perspective. Using separate staves means there's no way to tell that the lyrics are shared, rather than just one staff with lyrics and one without.

Well, in a grand staff the barlines are in the way for lyrics and the sound is wrong too (pianoi/organ), so that's not really appropriate (or requires more tweaking (for barlines, shoert and ling instrument names, sound, channels switches, etc.)

@Jojo-Schmitz, yes that's how it is now, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. For example, we could easily provide a Closed Stave SATB Grand Staff instrument that has those tweaks already.

Currently dynamics have two layout option: above or below (the staff), but I've thought for a while that dynamics on grand staves should have three layout options: above, below or between the staves. This means dynamics would be attached to the grand staff as a whole rather than one of the two staves. Closed Stave SATB would be a special case of that.

No, you can't have separate channels per staff, only per part

my instruments.xml with a piano with 8 channels (one for each voice in each stave) begs to differ ;)

Please show it.

http://www.mirbsd.org/music/Mscore3/instr.xml

OK, 8 channels, but not 4 per staff.

       <Instrument id="piano2">
            <trackName>Piano (2 channels)</trackName>
            <longName>Piano</longName>
            <shortName>Pno.</shortName>
            <description>Piano (twice one separate MIDI channels)</description>
            <musicXMLid>keyboard.piano</musicXMLid>
            <staves>2</staves>
            <clef>G</clef>
            <bracket>1</bracket>
            <bracketSpan>2</bracketSpan>
            <barlineSpan>2</barlineSpan>
            <clef staff="2">F</clef>
            <aPitchRange>21-108</aPitchRange>
            <pPitchRange>21-108</pPitchRange>
            <singleNoteDynamics>0</singleNoteDynamics>
            <Channel name="channel 1">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 2">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Articulation>
                <velocity>100</velocity>
                <gateTime>95</gateTime>
            </Articulation>
        </Instrument>
                <Instrument id="piano8">
            <init>piano2</init>
            <trackName>Piano (8 channels)</trackName>
            <description>Piano (twice four separate MIDI channels)</description>
            <Channel name="channel 3">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 4">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 5">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 6">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 7">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            <Channel name="channel 8">
                <program value="0"/> <!--Acoustic Grand Piano-->
            </Channel>
            </Instrument>

1*8 is not excatly the same a 2*4 here

Why not? You can assign them to the staves.

How? You can use any channel on any staff, you cannot restrict certain channels to certain staves

You can. The only reason I took so long is that I didn’t remember this needs Staff Text, not Instrument Change.

No you can't. both staff texts allow the use of all 8 channels

I don't regard anything MuseScore does right now as sacred. If MuseScore's handling of dynamics can be improved then I think we should go ahead and do it. If improving dynamics exposes some flaws in MuseScore's handling of channels then we should go ahead and improve those too.

> No you can't. both staff texts allow the use of all 8 channels

Erm… yes. So? That’s not a problem. The important thing is that it does allow you to assign individual channels to all 2*4 voices on a grand staff.

Revert accidental change of Workaround flag because the idiotic site javascript stole my focus…

No, 1*8 is not the same as 2*4.

Other than that the problem is much easier to solve: if there are lyrics below a staff, move the dynamics up. Nothing else is needed. KISS.

I'm revising the score of a large work for choir and orchestra now and this feature (lyrics below => dynamics above) would be a huge time/tedium saver. I can't find any evidence of it having made it into 4.0; is there any update on the status?

It isn't, that's why this issue is sti active...

But as this issue tracker here is being discontinued better report this on GitHub

See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/17883