Staff Merging -- A Specific Use

• Jun 14, 2011 - 20:40

I really love this project. I'm switching from Melody Assistant, and find note entry with MuseScore much quicker and easier.

I'm a barbershop addict. I sing bass in a quartet and in a competitive chorus.

Traditionally, barbershop arrangements are printed with two staves. The top staff has a treble cleff and shows the tenor and lead parts. The bottom staff has a bass cleff and shows the baritone and bass parts. You can tell the parts by the stem direction. The tenor has the stems up, and the lead is stem-down. The bass cleff is handled the same way.

As far as I can tell, with MuseScore, if you have two notes on a staff, forming a chord, the stems flip together. You can't have them in different directions. So, that isn't an option. Also, I don't think two staves can be merged for the printed output.

If this feature already exists, someone please reply and let me know. If not, I'd call this my fondest feature request.

Like I said, aside from my request, MuseScore is much easier to use than anything I've used before.

Comments

• Jun 14, 2011 - 23:40

Well, that and how to delete the instrument names :-)

I'm curious : for those who have wondered how to do this, tried looking for answers in the Handbook, and failed to find the section on Voices, what specific terms were you looking for instead. FWIW, "Voices" *is* the standard terminology for this in English - in particular, "multiple voices", but I'm thinking there could be some additional "see also" type of entries in the Handbook based on the most common alternatives people are looking for.

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• Jun 15, 2011 - 13:14

It took me some time to find out how to do this. "Voices" may be the standard terminology, but that doesn't mean that everyone will have come across it before. As I didn't know that I was looking for Voices, like others I added the second part ("voice") as a chord, and was frustrated for a while that chords required all notes to be the same length. It did seem unlikely that MuseScore would have this restriction, and after a while I found what I was looking for.

There is a link under the Note Entry section in the Handbook: "To create chords with notes of different durations see voices.", but this is some way from the top of the page. I think what happens is that new users work out for themselves how to enter notes, and don't get round to reading the Handbook carefully until they hit a brick wall. The various Tutorials and "cheat sheets" help, but it's still quite easy to miss the vital bit of information about Voices.

Perhaps Voices should come under Basics rather than Notation in the Handbook?

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• Jun 15, 2011 - 15:12

Perhaps the keywords split staff or stem directions could be added to the article. I don't know, though. I was able to find it eventually.

Here's another related question. Is it possible to control each voice on a multi-voice staff in the following settings:
playback mute
volume
stereo balance
different instrument

So in other words, I have a staff with two voices. I want to mute just the voice with stems-down or make it a violin while stems-up is an oboe, etc.

Thanks for your answers, guys.

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