Tuplet oddness?
Hi everyone,
As a longtime Sibelius user, I've been enjoying MuseScore—it's great! While creating my first few scores, I've noticed a few things that may not be intentional. I'm posting each of them here separately, as I was told it's easier to address them that way... Hope that's right. So, here we go:
(MS v3.6) When you select the first beat of a bar—let's say, a 1/4 note or rest—then you press Ctrl+3 to make it a triplet, the beat’s divided into tuplet 8ths, as you’d expect. But when you then press R-arrow to move to the next beat, then press Ctrl+3, it’s divided into tuplet 16ths (followed by a 1/8 rest). If you continue this with the 3rd and 4th beats, you get 32nd tuplets and 64th tuplets, respectively (see screenshot). Is there a logical reason for this?
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Comments
You need to re-select the desired duration, as first you had a quarter duration selected, then the Ctrl+3 created a triplet of 3 8th notes and seleected 8th as the duration to allow entering the notes, it stays at 8th for the next note, like it does normaly too.
A duration, once selected, stays until changed, only for tuplets that won't make sense, you certainly want the tuplets' sub division to be the default. So for the next duration you'd have to change back to whatever the desired durations should be.
In reply to You need to re-select the… by Jojo-Schmitz
(Sorry it took me a while to answer here—we've moved, and things are just becoming normal again.)
I understand what you're saying—but this ties in (no pun intended) with something more basic that I don't understand about MS.
If you click an existing note or rest, the toolbar's selected properties (time value, dotted/undotted, tied/untied, rest/non-rest, accidentals) change to the selection's properties. If you then press R or L arrow to move the selection, the toolbar changes to reflect each selected object's properties. This is the behaviour I've seen in Sibelius, Encore, and every other notation app I've used since the dawn of computer notation.
But in MS, as soon as you enter (type in) a note or rest, the selected properties "freeze" and are applied to each subsequent object you type, until you change them.
This requires you to manually select each new time value, every time you don't want to repeat the existing one—even when the object you've intentionally selected (with R/L arrow) is already the time value you want.
How can this be beneficial? If I'm entering a series of similarly-timed notes, then I press R arrow to move the selection to the next note (of a different value), I did that because I didn't want to repeat the selected value. Otherwise, I'd just type the next note, wouldn't I?
It's also unintuitive, because it makes the toolbar's behaviour inconsistent.
At all other times, the toolbar indicates the selection's properties. If you change the selection's properties, the toolbar still indicates those properties (which you've changed). It does not, on its own, determine properties that don't yet exist.
Except when you start typing in music. Then, for some reason, it does.
Can you explain what MS's authors were thinking when they made this choice? Because I see nothing but confusion and inconvenience.
And is there any possibility they could add an option for the toolbar not to behave this way, for those of us who'd find it easier, faster, and more logical and familiar?
In reply to (Sorry it took me a while to… by Andy Fielding
I can't look into their heads, but don't see any inconsistency either: You selkect a dureatipon, and that duration sticks until you change it.
Exception: On tuplet entry you start with the total duration of the tuplet, but very certainly want to continue entering notes in the sub-duration of that tuplet, so MuseScore changes to that for you. It doesn't change back though at the end of the tuplet, maybe is should or could. Fell free to submit that as a feature request (AKA Suggestion) into the issue tracker, or maybe first discuss it in the Feature Request forum
In reply to (Sorry it took me a while to… by Andy Fielding
One of the reasons might be that in the common case, when entering music, there is no use in taking over the next duration in the score, because that duration does not exist yet.
If you're actually repitching an existing rhythm, consider using Repitch Mode instead, which is oblivious to selected duration and follows already entered durations instead.
In reply to (Sorry it took me a while to… by Andy Fielding
Normally, when entering notes, you don't touch the cursor keys - you simply enter notes from left to right. And in that case, having the duration keys affect the next note makes perfect sense and is consistent with hoew other notations programs things (well, Finale offers both pre- and post- options, or did last I checked).
But if you're using the cursor keys while enters notes, you're already doing something a bit unusual, and it's harder to product why you might be doing it or what your expectations might be. If you attach a sample score and describe your special case scenario, we may be able to understand better and suggest alternatives. But in general, for me personally, having the note input toolbar not change itself willy-nilly while I cursor about in the cases where I do wish to makes perfect sense and is often consistent with my reasons for cursoring. It would be extremely annoying to have selected a duration then decide to cursor back to correct a mistake in pitch or whatever, then find I had to re-select my duration because it changed out from under me while I was attending to something else.
Hi, you can use "R" to copy the 1st triplet, if you need others triplets in following. When the first is OK, go out of note input (N), select the whole triplet (1st note -last note) and when it becomes blue, use simply "R". And severals times if necessary . If your following measure is full of triplets, select the 1st measure and , idem, use "R". You have also another way : you start with an empty measure , with a whole rest, I suppose you need 4 triplets : change the whole rest in 4 quater rests (with 5) . When you have your 4 quater rests, select the measure (not a note) and tape CTRL + 3 , you get 4 triplets in 1 time.