Score transposition

• May 16, 2021 - 11:38

I post this out of curiosity more than necessity.......I had a paper score for a clarinet quartet scored for clarinet 1 in Bb, clarinet 2 in Bb, clarinet 3 in Bb and bass clarinet.

I liked the score and wanted it for my saxophone quartet so I typed it into Musescore 3 and used the 'stave properties' > 'change instrument' function to transpose the score for SATB saxophones and that worked as it should with the parts now labelled in the score as sop sax, alto sax, tenor sax and baritone sax.

When I then generated the parts for printing, I was surprised that the parts were labelled carinet 1 in Bb, clarinet 2 in Bb, clarinet 3 in Bb and baritone saxophone!

This wasn't a problem of course because I simply changed the text on the parts before printing, but I wonder why three of the four parts remained labelled as clarinet after the score was transposed for saxophones.

Was it something I did or didn't do?


Comments

I can confirm this behaviour. It seems to only happen when there is more than one instrument of a given type in the score and the recently added feature of automatically numbering them kicks in. I tried starting with flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon and changing to a quartet of saxes and that worked ok. All the part names were changed to the appropriate sax. Similarly changing the instruments to anything else resulted in the correct part names. However, starting with two flutes and two oboes, which were automatically numbered flute 1, flute 2 and oboe 1 and oboe 2 and changing to four Bb clarinets, the part names were not changed and remained as flutes and oboes.

The automatic numbering is a nice feature but this seems to be a bug that could be added to the issue tracker. I would suggest a severity of minor as there is a pretty simple workaround.

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