Muted Brass

• Jun 2, 2015 - 12:52

Firstly, I've been using music notation software since 1994, bought my first Mac in 1988, am a veteran of PhotoShop, QuarkXPress, Illustrator etc. and I'm used to problem solving, at least, I thought I was until I tried muting and un-muting brass mutes in MuseScore. (It would be useful not to assign two entirely different meanings to the word 'mute').

My current score has an 'open' staff throughout the whole score sounding muted for some reason. A bar that is filled with muted brass 16th notes all sounds muted OK except for the last 16th note in the bar which sounds 'open' and absolutely will NOT respond to corrections, no matter how many times I try or how many times I visit online help etc. Indeed, when I go back into the box to check 'muted' again the command disappears each time. I have two bars of tied notes which are muted but the sustained note changes to sounding 'open' half way through!!

This is a 1.3 score that I've opened in 2.0 and I'm using General User GS museScore v 1.442 rather than the shipped font, which I don't like.

There are many other problems with font sizes and alignment etc. that seem to involve compatibility issues. I never, EVER blame my tools for my own shortcomings but life really is too short for all this.

Any advice would be welcomed, John Morton.


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I've attached the file Jojo. It's presented warts-and-all with alignment problems and wrong font sizes etc that didn't transfer properly. There is other 'debris' on the pages, also.

2.0 doesn't seem to recognise the page breaks from 1.3, which might explain a few things.

It's almost as if the invisible area 'behind' the music has attributes assigned to it.

Thanks, John Morton. Emblazon.mscz Emblazon.mscz

I solved the full length stave problem somehow.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Somehow I solved the staff. Don't know how. I changed things in the mixer and then changed them back.

End of bar 8: last 16th notes in both 1 and 2 cornet parts sounding 'open'.

Bars 55/58: can't get cornet 4 to sound muted and Eb cornet changes to 'open' sound bar 57.

(This score is a mess since file transfer from 1.3)

John Morton.

In reply to by John Morton

The reason the last note of measure 8 is playing open is that the there is a text with the word "Open" (and set to actually do this) attached to that note. The text has been dragged or otherwise moved to *appear* like it is at the beginning of measure 11, but select it and press Ctrl+R and you'll see it is actually attached to the last note of measure 8. Then you can cut and paste it back back to measure 11, and delete the extra "mute" texts you tried adding.

Measure 55, you didn't set the "Mute" text to actually perform that function. Most liekly you forgot to press the button(s) to select which voice(s) you wish to affect - that's a newe step in the process for 2.0, because it now supports the possibility of selecting sounds differently per voice.

Feel free to share the 1.3 version and we can probably help you figure out how to clean up the things that went wrong on import. In general, 1.3 hard-codes font information into text thus making it unresponsive to the text style changes that are one of the most important new features in 2.0. It also had bugs where fonts were not properly resized on staff size changes, leading to situations where two text items would claim to have the same font size but display differently, or display the same but actually have different sizes. These are among the issues that often need cleanup on import into 2.0.

Usually one of the first things I suggest doing if you wish to import a 1.3 score into 2.0 is remove the hard coded text formatting by selecting all text (right click one, Select / All similar elements) and hitting the Reset to Text Style button in the Inspector. Do that for each "type" of text (staff text, rehearsal marks, etc). Then it becomes much easier to work with - the new text style facvility will allow you to easily change the font characteristics of all text of give type at once, but for existing and yet-to-be-added text.

BW, as for the word "mute", presumably you realize it isn't just MuseScore that uses this word for two different (albeit related) things. This is the industry standard for both the device you insert into an instrument to make the sound muffled, but also the industry standard term for the button on a mixing console that disables the sound from a particular channel.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for this. I suspected the word 'open' and couldn't find a dotted line connection; the Ctrl+R is useful to know. Re measure 55 I did all that. Tried everything. The muted command wouldn't stay put in the box. I tried just one voice and then all of them. This cured an earlier problem. Your advice about the hard coding should enable me to get by from now on. Thanks for that.

My comments about double meanings were aimed at the industry, of course.

On the positive side, I've recently acquired Finale which is an awful program for manual inputting and the sounds are not THAT much better, in fact the MuseScore muted sound is far better. No matter what I did the Finale mutes sounded like a hurdy-gurdy. Trying to cut and paste parts of bars is almost impossible in Finale but totally stable in MuseScore.

Thanks again, John Morton.

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