Showing number of repeats on score

• Aug 20, 2013 - 22:37

I have four bars that I want repeated three times.

This works fine in terms of getting MuseScore to play the repeat (I set start and end repeat bar lines, then right-click on the last bar, select Measure properties from the context menu and set "repeat count" to 3).

But if I print out my score and give it to someone, they can see the start and end of the repeat, but how do they know I want those bars repeated 3 times, rather than 2 or 5 or some other number of times? There doesn't seem to be any specific functionality in MuseScore for this, and, while I could use the text function, from looking on the web, there doesn't seem to be any standard notation for how many times to repeat. One person says there should be a number over the first bar, someone else says there should be something like "x3" over the last bar.

Does anyone know what the rules are here?


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

Thank you very much. That is what I did. Even so, if you look at the Wikipedia article on musical notation, it doesn't mention anything about x3 or what the convention is for indicating the number of repeats, and in general, discussions of repeats do not refer to how the number of repeats should be shown. Strange.

In reply to by Chilperic

There is no single convention for this. It historically has not been very common to have a repeated section that is anything but twice, I suspect - it's mostly a pop/jazz thing. Or, I suppose, hymns, but then the lyrics make it obvious. Instrumental scores I see that use this device usually say something like "Play 3 times" above the first measure of the section if it is to be played more than twice.

Can this be made into a feature request?

This is not at all rare when it comes to making song charts, especially lead sheets that you want to fit on one page. Any section you can repeat, you do; sometimes even 8 times. Putting a little "4x" or some such just above or below the staff prior to the repeat barlines would be perfect. Some other ideas are discussed here:

https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/74084/is-there-a-definitive-n…

And have it tied programmatically to the Play Count, please, similar to how the Tempo indicator text is drawn from the actual tempo.

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