How to efficiently enter lots of triplets? (or tuplets in general)

• Jun 9, 2021 - 10:39

I have a long passage of music that's all in quaver triplets - I know how to enter one triplet, but every time I've finished entering each one it jumps out of triplet mode and now into the half the duration of the triplet, so I have to remember to keep typing 5 ctrl+3 after every 3 notes. Further if I forget and accidentally enter a large section in regular quavers I can't see how to convert them to triplets (which would be OK as a way to enter a large number at once, though not quite ideal).
Is there a way to just "lock in" the current step-mode duration as 1/3rd of a crotchet (1/4 note) and make it stay there until I'm done?
(BTW in the current example I'm working on the triplets are actually a measured tremolo, i.e. each one is a repeated chord, so it would be even more efficient just to enter the whole passage in 1/4 notes the apply some tool to split each one into repeated triplets, not sure if there's a way to do that easily, perhaps with a plugin?)


Comments

(Update: a sort of workaround exists where you fill the measures first with 1/4 note rests, convert those to triplet 8th rests, then you can use step entry mode to enter notes in their place)

Once you press "4" you will enter 1/8 notes until you explicitly change that choice.
Once you press "5 CTRL 3" you will enter only one triplet.
Not only is that an exception (UI based on exceptions are bad) but there is no "sticky" option to force triplet duration to behave like all other ones

In reply to by frfancha

Well if 99% of the time entering a triplet was a "one off" operation the current behavior might well make sense. I'd agree it might be more than 50% of the time though, and you need an obvious way of leaving triplet mode for those cases. I suppose just pressing the duration number key should do that. There are reason tuplets need certain special behavior, though not as much as MuseScore seems to insist on. How do you enter nested tuplets I wonder?

In reply to by Dylan Nicholson1

Actually nested tuplets work fine except that there's no automatic collision avoidance strangely.
But it looks like the way it currently works the only way it could stay in tuplet mode after entering the first tuplet is to automatically add a new tuplet of rests that you can then replace - but if you didn't want that you'd have to undo it somehow. Currently it seems the only way to de-tuplet something is to use the Undo command or select the tuplet bracket itself and delete it (which deletes all the notes in it too).

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