Changing instruments of voices//microtonality

• Feb 27, 2021 - 03:16

Hello,

I'm new to musescore, this is my first post in this forum - I'm still not sure if it's the best tool for my use case, please forgive me that I didn't yet completely read the handbook.

I have two questions.

My first question is: I want to better understand, say, BWV 540 (the big F major organ toccata), or maybe the organ trio sonatas. I want to listen to it with different instuments playing the voices (which are really separate and individual in this material). I downloaded some scores here on musescore.org, but I have a problem with all: the manual voices are assigned one instrument (and accordingly one midi channel) and I was only able to change the instrument for playback/export for both of them. I want to assign different instruments to the two manual voices. Is this possible, hopefully, without having to select the complete first line of the score over all the pages to copy and paste?

My second question: if I want to experiment with quartertones, sixth-tones, different tuning systems, 128 notes per octave tuning etc - is this comfortably possible?

Seems not out of the box. When I add such notes to the score, they are rounded to half-tones. OTOH, when I try to import a midi files containing quartertones, they don't survive the import. So I guess I have to use addons? Which ones? Is it comfortable? Why does the program allow to add such tones and doesn't warn that they are not fully supported or suggest the installation of an according addon? Or could it be that my installation is not perfect or incomplete? I have installed the musescore3 packages from Debian Linux (testing).

Thanks in advance, Michael.

Comments

• Feb 27, 2021 - 19:06

Hello! If I understand correctly, it should be possible to do what you want. If you attach your score, we can understand and assist better, but ads it is we can make some decent guesses. Assumign your score has three staves all belonging to a single organ instrument, and you want this to be converted into three different instruments, that's trivial with copy and paste. Just add the new instrument(s) with Edit / Isntruments, select the material you want copied (eg, ctrl+A to select all, or click first measure of a single staff and Ctrl+Shift+End to select to the end on that staff only)m Ctrl+C to copy, then select the destination and Ctrl+V to paste.

As for "experimenting" with microtones, sure, it's possible, the Inspector gives you the ability to tune notes as desired. Also there are a wide variety of micritonal accidentals on the palette, and plugins that can automatically tune the notes accordingly - see the Download / Plugins menu above.

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• Feb 28, 2021 - 00:02

Hello Marc,

thanks for the key bindings, sounds as if these should do it what I want, I'll report back.

As for microtones: ok, so I need a plugin. Unfortunately I need help with this. When I open the plugin manager, I only see a list of 12 more or less trivial plugins (like colornotes, helloqml, panel, random, walk) that seem to be part of the installation. So I guess I have to download some plugin from somewhere, save it locally, and specify the path in the plugin manager (mine has no "web sources" or something like that). Can you suggest a plugin I could try?

Thanks so far, and have a nice rest of the weekend,

Michael.

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• Mar 3, 2021 - 01:21

The conversion of the score to three different instruments succeeded. Took one minute or so, was indeed very easy with your help, and now I already know some basic keys.

The only thing musescore3 didn't get totally right - a purely graphical problem: in the result (obtained by applying copy and paste as you had described) most lines contain seven or eight bars. But some lines contain only one. Neither is the notation in these bars in any way special or more complex nor are these bars given an individual line in the original score. Looks accidental. How can I fix that? Ahh - seems { and } are for that. Ok, then I think I'll be fine. I think next I'll try my hand at the organ trio sonatas.

Regards,
Michael.

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