Chord Symbols with Natural Sign

• Mar 13, 2018 - 20:47

Is it possible to create a chord symbol with a 'natural' symbol? I realize that I could specify the numeric degree with just a numeral. However in this context which is 'educational' I want to 'flag' the musician that a Natural 9 should be played.

For example: C-7b5 in most contexts is a Locrian mode with a b9

I want to 'explicitly' indicate that C-7b59 to maps to a Locrian Natural 9 (or Locrian Natural 2) scale (melodic minor mode) in a context where it may not be 'obvious' (e.g. less experience musician).

Desired result: C-7b5[natural_symbol]9

Any ideas to make this work?


Comments

I don't believe there is a MuseScore shortcut key that will insert a natural sign. However what you can do is use the unicode symbol for natural (♮) and simply select that from my comment here and paste it into a chord symbol before the 9.

In reply to by ericfontainejazz

ericfontainjazz,

Thanks for your response.

FYI: I found that the Unicode value for the natural sign is: 266E If using Windows and/or MS-Office, there are several methods for entering a Unicode character using the numeric code. Can also be found in the Character Map for the Segoe UI Symbol font.

If I enter a half-diminished chord, the 'flat' symbol is super-scripted:
Chord4.PNG
If I add the natural 9, font is correct, but i lose the super-scripting for the 'flat' symbol. Presumably, this is because this chord is not 'recognized' by Musescore as a 'valid' chord. Adding 'just' the '9' exhibits similar behavior.
Chord5.PNG
However, for my limited purpose, this works as I had intended. Jazz purists will likely scoff, but for the purpose of conveying ('hitting one over the head') that this is an 'all' melodic minor progression, it does the purpose:
Chord3.PNG

Locrian ♮9 mode | Altered mode | Melodic minor mode
F melodic minor | Ab melodic minor | C melodic minor

Thanks again for your help.

Ken

In reply to by EulerOperator

great. That workaround will have to do for now. The presence of the unicode natural symbol is probably confusing MuseScore, thus it doesn't know how to digest the characters making up the chord symbol anymore. But I hear there will be some advancements with chord symbols for 3.0, so hopefully a way to input extra symbols such as natural signs will be addressed.

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