misplaced chord names

• Apr 15, 2015 - 19:38

Musescore puts some of my chord names in the middle of the staff lines instead of on top. I have tried changing the placement via Display/Style/Edit text style/ chordnames and then adjusting the Y-axis offset. But it doesnt work. Any ideas anyone?


Comments

If you mean between two staves, and not overtop of the staff lines, then it sounds like you are adding them to the bottom staff. Add chords only to the top staff.

In reply to by schepers

Thanks for the suggestion, but I only have 1 staff. I'm writing lead sheets with a treble staff for melody and the chord names above it. But instead of appearing above they appear right in the middle, mixed in with the notes. I can drag them to where they should be, but this is very laborious and prone to error as it is often impossible to click on the chord name as a note is often in the way -- so I have to drag the note away, move the chord name, then bring the note back to where it is supposed to be. Imagine having to do that through 32 bars! There has to be a way of moving all the chord names globally.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I too thought that the problem was the style settings, so I experimented with different values for the X parameter on the window Style/Edit Text Style /chordname, but it didn't seem to make any difference, But this morning when I went to enter some chordnames, they popped up in the right place!

I don't have the original with the misplaced chord names since I moved them by dragging them one at a time from in the middle of the staff to above it. However, I do have one with a C and a Dm7 in the wrong place in the 2nd line of the score. As I say, if I enter new chords into that score, they now come up in the right place.

I'm using 1.2 because 2.0 won't work with my OS 10.6. (I am wary of updating because I have heard horror stories of Excel and Word files becoming inaccessible on newer versions of the OS, and that would be a disaster.

I built the score from scratch, didn't use a template. I'll try to attach it herewith Cheek to Cheek.mscz

In reply to by mjsol1

In 1.x changes to (most?) text stiles only get applied to elements entered after the change.
And chord symbols are a particular strange beastie here, even if those stiles would take effect, you won't see it until after a reload of the score.
I can see that your score deviates from the default style of chords, x-offset being -2 rather than -4, both are above staff though.
There are some chord symbols in the staff, beat 3 of measure 2, beat 1 and 3 of measure 5, those do behave properly after select, Ctrl+R, so they look as if having been dragged down into the staff?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thanks Jo-jo, that's very helpful.

Useful to know that simply changing the style settings will not immediately move the chord names.

And you suggest that it may work if I change settings, save, and then reload. I have done that and it doesn't seem to. (I also tried selecting the whole score and then changing the style parameters; didn't work.)

So the bottom line seems to be that there is no way to globally shift all the chord names at once. (You'd think there would be, since it is analogous to transposing notes, and simpler to program.) One is stuck with having to drag each chord name into position, one by one. Which can be a pain if the chord name is sitting on top of the note, as sometimes it proves difficult to click on the name -- the note always lights up instead -- so that you first have to drag the note away, then move the chord name, then bring the note back to where it should be. But your tip about using Ctrl+R rather than trying to drag helps a lot. (Where is this shortcut to be found in the manual?)

As for those chord names in measure 2 and 5, I didn't drag them down into the staff, as you surmised, but rather dragged ALL the other chord symbols out of the staff into space -2 above the staff, but for some reason those 3 chords jumped back into the staff when I re-opened.

Oh and the reason for putting the x-offset at -2 rather than -4 was to get them in under the voltas and not on them. (But perhaps there is a way of expanding the spaces between the staves and/or the staff lines themselves so that -4 would work even with voltas.

So, thank you once again. Even if the problem of how to shift all chord names globally isn't solvable, at least you have helped me manage it.

In reply to by mjsol1

Even in 1.3 there are definitely wasys of moving all chords as once. As mentioned, changing the text style and reloading works. If you have a specific score where some specific change to text style does not appear to work, please post that score and the precise steps to reproduce the problem. Chances are it's just something you aren't quite doing right, though.

It also works to select a bunch of items (eg, right click, select / all similar elements), press Ctrl, then drag (Ctrl prevents the start of the drag from selecting the items other than the one you are actually clicking). But again, it will look like it didn't work (or worse, that the chords disappeared) until you reload.

2.0 not only make text styles work much better, but also fixes that drag bug, and provides other simple ways of moving items (the Inspector in particular). Definitely worth figuring how how to make Word & Excel happy if possible.

But the real question to me is why this came up at all. Ubless you were messing with things, the chord symbols should have been above the staff to begin with - you should't have ever needed to move them or ever had a problem where they were overlapping the staff.

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