Deleting rests in the middle of a bar
I am new to MuseScore and although I have Marc Sabatella's excellent book I can't find a way to delete a rest from the middle of a bar, other than deleting all the remaining notes and re-entering them without the rest. The scenario is that I've accidentally entered a quaver rest in a bar and carried on entering notes, so all the subsequent notes are shuffled forward incorrectly. I want to delete the erroneous rest and have all the notes shuffle back into their correct positions! Is this possible?
Comments
You don't delete rests, you replace them with notes just like you don't delete silence, you replace it with music. If you delete music, there will be silence, so if you delete notes there will be rests.
In short: use cut and paste.
Click on the 1st element (note/chord/rest) you want to keep, shift+click on the last, Ctrl+X, click on the spro you want that section really start (that errnous rest), Ctrl+V
In reply to You don't delete rests, you by Jojo-Schmitz
Thank you! That seems fairly obvious now I think about it... :-)
In reply to Thank you! That seems fairly by NickyInStreatham
;-)
Consider:
If MuseScore were strictly a mere WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) graphics program, then surely you should be able to delete a rest/note and drag adjacent elements to fill the void.
However...
MuseScore has playback capabilities, so that errant rest actually occupies a time position which the playback engine has assigned to it based on your input. For example, it might have been entered on the second beat of the measure - so, MuseScore 'plays' silence (as opposed to a note) for the duration of the quaver time value. The status bar, displayed at the very bottom of the screen, shows (among other things) the time position for every note/rest in your score.
So...
If you want that quaver rest gone, you simply cut the succeeding notes (however many you wish to shift to an earlier time position, as MuseScore cannot know how many you want moved) and then paste them on top of that errant quaver rest.
This way, when you play it back, the passage that you want shifted will commence play on the very beat that the errant rest formerly occupied.
To select a range of notes...
One way is to click on the first note, then Shift+click on the last desired note/rest.
For other ways, see:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/selection-modes#range-select
Regards and welcome aboard...
In reply to Consider: If MuseScore were by Jm6stringer
Just a slight remark on the graphics program analogy:
1. Paint a picture in Paint/GIMP/PhotoShop
2. Select an area to delete and delete it
3. There is now empty space, no shifting of other image data is done
Both situations simply don't alter what you weren't working on (hadn't selected). That choice has nothing to do with playback capabilities.
In reply to Just a slight remark on the by jeetee
Indeed. The similarity is the idea of elements having *fixed positions* - in time (for MuseScore) or *in space* (for a graphics program). Deleting one element doesn't affect other elements because those elements are assumed to be fixed in time/space. I think this is the key concept that many newcomers struggle with. I keep trying to find ways of explaining it clearly, and I'm always happy to see others succeeding at this :-)
A difference, of course, is that the "empty space" left behind when you delete graphic data is perfectly valid. Whereas in music notation, there is no way to represent "empty time" except, of course, with rests.
In reply to Just a slight remark on the by jeetee
@jetee...
1. Select an area in Paint/Gimp/Photoshop and delete it. OK - I understand.
What was the other situation you refer to when you wrote: "Both situations simply don't alter what you weren't working on (hadn't selected)."
Regards.
In reply to @jetee... 1. Select an area by Jm6stringer
The other situation is selecting something in musescore for deletion :)
In reply to The other situation is by jeetee
Ah yes, so long as it is not a rest (in voice 1) that one selects for deletion. There can be no 'valid' blank space created for a rest, as in Paint/GIMP.
On the other hand...
Deletion of other score elements like chord names, dynamics, hairpins, etc. behave differently, as removal actually leaves behind 'valid' empty space (as in Paint/GIMP). Such score elements don't generate a temporal placeholder - i.e. a rest - upon deletion.
Regards.
In reply to Ah yes, so long as it is not by Jm6stringer
And there's the misconception:
The rest is the valid blank space.
If you delete a hairpin, you're left with no hairpin, which can only be represented by not drawing one.
If you delete a dynamic, you're left with no dynamic, which can only be represented by not drawing one.
Music is sound: if you delete/remove sound, you're left with no sound (silence), which can only be represented by drawing a rest.
In reply to And there's the by jeetee
''The rest is the valid blank space''
Not "all" rests, delete note you get a rest, delete the rest you get a full measure rest.
In reply to ''The rest is the valid blank by frfancha
All rests are valid blank space.
Compare again with a graphics program:
Situation 1: Select 4 consecutive areas and press delete
Situation 2: Select 1 area the same size of the 4 others and press delete
Both result in a similar (but not the same!) result:
Situation 1: You now have 4 empty regions, who just happen to be right next to each other
Situation 2: You now have 1 empty region, the same size of the 4 others combined.
A rest is the only valid way to show silence, just as turning pixels to the background color is the only way to show empty graphics.
In reply to And there's the by jeetee
The rest is the valid blank space.
In MuseScore, perhaps ... and that's the quandary:
The rest is actually a glyph; so, graphically speaking, not truly blank space. It represents 'blank sound' (or a duration of silence) in music playback. A dedicated graphics program (without sound playback) would be able to delete it - actually remove the ink squiggle, whatever shape (crotchet, quaver, etc.) it takes. Also, deleting a note would not 'add a rest'.
It seems to me that's what newcomers get miffed about. See attachment.
Regards.
In reply to The rest is the valid blank by Jm6stringer
"In MuseScore, perhaps ..."
Not in MuseScore, in music!
First note that the graphics program analogy is just that: an analogy. This inherently means that the one thing (MuseScore) is much like the other thing (the graphics program) for this specific area of comparison. Being an analogy also means they are not exactly the same and that the analogy will break at a given point.
But even here, and especially for you, I can show you the analogy doesn't even break. Lets take mspaint, one of the most basic graphics programs you can have (which most definitely doesn't have sound playback):
1. Create a new image
2. Bucket fill it (by default this makes the image entirely black, as that is the default drawing color)
3. Make a rectangular selection and press delete
--> The inside of the selection becomes white (something you now describe as empty)
4. Click anywhere outside of the selection to clear it
5. Change the background color to green (or whatever, just not white or black)
6. Make a new rectangular selection, make sure it contains an area that is both black (filled) and white (empty)
7. Hit delete
--> The inside of your selection now becomes green (the new way of showing empty).
It seems you simply misunderstood what empty means in a graphics program as well.
As MuseScore is a music notation program (not a graphics program, also not primarly a playback program) the only way for it to show 'empty' music is the way musical notation describes it: using rests.
In reply to "In MuseScore, perhaps by jeetee
Well, I guess if you change the definition of 'empty' from white to green, I see your point:
Yes, selecting an area in Paint and then deleting will change to whatever is the currently assigned background color. So it is possible to have a 'new' empty. It just seems to me a bit disingenuous to change the background (and therefore the 'empty' color) midstream.
My point is that MuseScore is not like a dedicated graphics program where deletion of a rest would result in the removal of the glyph itself, exposing whatever background color was beneath it. From reading the forum posts, I think that's the behavior most newcomers are intuitively expecting - elimination of the rest, thus showing whatever the color of the background paper they chose for the score.
Regards.
In reply to Well, I guess if you change by Jm6stringer
The difference then is, in a graphics program, you can delete a portion of the image, leave empty space behind, and be left with a valid image. In music - not just MuseScore - this leaves you with too few beats in the measure(s). So you need to do *something* to fix this. The various ideas that pop up from time to time about having a special "scratchpad" mode where this is allowed, at least temporarily, speak to the desire to have something along these lines, but the devil ends up being in the details, and my sense is, probably no one who has ever propsoed such a mode (myself included) has *really* thought through the details of how that would work when push came to shove.
I know this is old, and my comment is probably unrelated, but I hope this still helps. When you need to input a shortage of notes in a measure, and you get an empty rest, you can actually just left click on the measure, then right click, and click on measure properties. Under actual, you can input how many notes will actually be there.
For instance, if you're time signature is 4/4 or even 2/2, and you want to put in just 3 beats, you can change the 'actual' to 3/4, and it'll remove the trailing rest. About removing a rest in the middle of your measure, I don't know anything other than CTRL-Z (CMD-Z if you're using a Mac).