Move notes from one staff to another (when both staves have exactly the same rhythm in that beat)

• Apr 19, 2021 - 23:00

Is there a way to do that?
This thread seems to indicate that there isn't: https://musescore.org/en/node/275090

When one is notating piano chords in treble and bass staves, notes have to be often moved from one staff to the other, specially if they have been imported from MIDI. We tend to notate together the notes played with the left hand in the bass clef and the notes played with the right hand in the treble staff but obviously there is no way that Musescore can get that information from a MIDI recording so we always have to correct that manually. Cutting and pasting notes, or adding them with the shift button pressed is time consuming, therefore a function to move a group of selected notes from the treble staff to the bass staff would be greatly appreciated!


Comments

This is but one of very many reasons why importing from MIDI is never a particularly efficient way to get music - particularly piano music - into notation software. But, if the staves have the same rhythm, it's easy enough in a couple of different ways, one being Tools / Implode, another being to copy/paste notes individually. If you have a specific score and a particular set of notes you are trying to move and can't figure out how to get those tools to help, attach the score here so we can understand and assist better.

In reply to by drmq

Ah, moving just one note of a chord into another chord, yeah, that's trickier. If it's at all possible to do that sort of thing first in the DAW it will save tons of trouble. Either by recording hands separately, or by somehow convincing the DAW to export two separate tracks and moving notes from track to track there. it's way easier to do that sort of thing when it's just MIDI data than when it's notation, so DAW programs generally will be better about providing those sorts of controls.

That said:

Add two more staves below the top one. Select the top. Tools / Explode. Now the chord is split among the top three staves. Then select the bottom two and run Tools / Implode, twice. Then do the same for the top two staves.

I am not sure you'll like the results as much as you think you might, though, the C added to the LH looks very strange so far from the rest of the chord. And for good reason - I can't imagine actually choosing to play it this way. Still, I get the point, had the C been placed on the bottom staff and you wanted to move it to the top, you'd have the same issue, and the same potential solution such as it is,

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

You're right, the C is in it's right place. I was just giving you an artificial example. Actually, I had to do the opposite when I generated this score (move the C from the bass staff to the treble staff).

Thanks for the tip with Implode/Explode. It is still far from ideal but it may help.

Finally you are spot on when you say that this has to be done in the DAW. I actually used Cubase which has a function to move notes from one staff to the other in the score editor (this inspired this feature request). However it is buggy as hell and it sometimes creates corrupt xml files when you do that (I just lost 2h today because of this). I really can't wait until the day when I will be able to replace Cubase by Musescore for these tasks.

In reply to by drmq

Have a look at the prunestack plugin; I don't remember if it can directly move the notes to a different staff, but I believe it can do an in-staff explode to a different voice, thus allowing easier copy-pasting and imploding afterwards.

If you on the other hand just want a fixed split point (the C) then right-click the staff and use "split staff"; then implode the split off part with the bottom part and remove the original bottom staff again.

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