Swap the selected contents of two staffs

• May 15, 2016 - 09:43

I have a multi staff system, and i want to play with the arrangement. In particular I want to swap the content of two different staffs. For example, If I have the oboe in one staff, and the english horn in another staff, I want to exchange so that the oboe plays what was the english horn part, and vice versa.

The way I normally do this is go to Edit Instruments, Add a temporary instrument such as flute,
then select the notes in several measures I want to change, cut and paste the oboe to flute, then cut and past the english horn to the oboe, then cut and past the flute to the english horn.

This is very awkward. Isn't there a better way.


Comments

In reply to by jim.newton.562

But when first of all in your case the layout isn't most important and you only want to pick out the best sound for harmony and instrument be aware that you can change after inserting text/instrument the sound of each instrument in the mixer and play around with different sounds for this part of your sheet.

In reply to by kuwitt

The problem with inserting breaks, is that you need to insert the break BEFORE you lose your place. It is often that I make a change in a measure and musescore moves the measure to a different page. It is not really practical to always insert a page break before every edit to prevent musescore from moving my measure to a different page.

I understand that musescore is doing a lot of work to try to optimize which page to put the measure on. But it is still difficult to find things that are moving around.

In reply to by jim.newton.562

I suggest you work in Continuous View until you've got the music in the score finalised, then shift to Page View and start doing your graphic formatting and page make-up.
Only once the music itself is finished should you start worrying about bad page turns, courtesy accidentals, and all the rest of that stuff. Composing music and designing pages are entirely different tasks. If you try to do both at the same time, you will drive yourself round the bend, because everytime you change something in the music, all your layout work will have to be done over. ;o(

istead of copypasting with a temp staff, why don't you simply change intrument?

right click ok staff -> properties -> change instrument -> (select instrument)
same with the other one to swap.

no copies, no bar position changes, 20 seconds.

whem you are done with all setups, change instruments order in edit -> instruments ... arrows

In reply to by n.costacurta

Changing the instrument of a staff is completely the wrong approach. It changes the instrument for the ENTIRE staff, not just the selected notes. What I'm wanting to do is decide which harmonies of particular passages work best with the particular instruments the piece is being arranged for.

For example suppose the main theme is written on the top staff, e.g., for the oboe. I'd like to throughout the piece move certain phrases of the theme to different instruments so that each instrument gets to play part of the interesting theme at some point during the piece.

In reply to by jim.newton.562

If that's what you want to do then it wasn't particularly obvious from your original post or its title. If you are just experimenting and want to hear how it sounds with a different instrument playing the melody then you can swap the instrument sounds in the Mixer while you are listening to the piece. If you want a permanent swap mid-staff then you need to insert an Instrument Change as other have mentioned. If you actually want to move notes between staves then you currently have no choice other than creating a dummy staff or a few dummy measures to hold the notes temporarily. As Isaac mentioned, a better solution is on its way, but don't expect it to arrive in the next few months.

Actually, the method you have described is probably the best one to use while still working on your arrangement. Just set up your score to include at least one 'blank' instrument line (in concert pitch, preferably), and use it as a sort of temporary holding pen for material you want to shuffle around. When you're satisfied with the orchestral balance and have your parts set the way you want them, delete the extraneous instrument(s) and save the score as a 'final' version.

I suppose it would be convenient to be able to swap two individual parts with a single click of the mouse, but I don't see that ability as a high priority feature request. It takes me an about 10 or 15 seconds to do what you have described when I realise I've written the V.II part higher than the V.I part and want to switch them. Not a big deal, IMO....

In reply to by Recorder485

I'm a long time emacs user. Emacs has developed many concepts for super effective editing over its 30 to 40 years of existence. I really miss some of these useful concepts when using "modern" editors.

One concept is there is a difference between the point and the mark. The point is where the cursor is. The mark is wherever you put it last. There are lots of things you can do using the point and mark. E.g., the region is the area between the point and mark, so you can copy, kill, capitalize, sort .... the region.

Another idea is the idea of swapping. If the point stands between two letters, words, lines, s-expressions, paragraphs etc you can swap them.

Another idea is there is a kill ring. I.e., every time you kill some text, it goes into a ring. and I can later cycle through all those things in the ring. So I can kill region1, then kill region2, then easily insert what was in region 1, and then insert what was in region 2.

Another idea is that you can record keystrokes, name them and play them back. they are called keyboard macros.

I think these ideas probably sound foreign to anyone who is not an emacs user :-(. But on the other hand they are part of the reason an emacs user is never satisfied with any other editor.

Does anyone know what the editing model in "modern" editors such as Xcode, or eclipse is for exchanging text in two different paragraphs? In emacs, I have access to all the previous things I copied. In vi (as I understand) you can copy regions to registers and then paste them back from a register later.

Hi! I was recently creating a quartet score and wanted to switch the inner voices, and I think I found a way to do this the exact thing you're talking about! Before you begin writing out the parts, you can label the oboe part as voice 1 (the notes will appear in the default blue color when selected), and label the english horn part as voice 2 (appearing in green when selected). Then if you want to exchange those voices, go to Tools>Voices>Exchange Voices 1 and 2. If you label your parts before you begin working, you'll be able to exchange up to 4 voices/instruments. I know this answer is 6 years late, but I hope this helps!

In reply to by hannahshutece

I had a quartet piece with the melody in the 2nd violin (both parts were just called "violin" in the score). I went to Edit>Instruments, selected the second violin part, and used the up arrow on the right side of the box to move that part to the top of the list. That moved the second line to the top of the score. Because both violin parts were named "violin" I didn't have to change 2nd to 1st; this might not have worked if I had chosen "string quartet" when creating a new piece (I took someone else's score and modified the instruments).

Exchange Voices didn't work for me--it inserted whole note rests above each part, and I'm not sure the parts actually switched, maybe because the parts were labelled "violin" instead of voices 1 and 2.

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