New user - numbering lyrics and multiple chords per note

• Dec 29, 2018 - 11:48

Hi,
I'm new to Musescore, and I'm trying to create a lead sheet for a song. There are a couple of formatting problems I can't work out how to solve, though.

  1. I want to put 2 verses under the notes, and number them something like this. I can add the verses, that's fine, but I don't see an option to number them (I don't want to add the numbers to the lyrics themselves, as that misaligns the first word under its note).
  2. I have a bar where the melody is a single note - a whole note - but the chords are two half-note chords. So I want to add two chord symbols above that single note - like this.

Is it possible to do these? And if so, how?

I've checked the documentation (although there's a lot of it, so I could well have missed something!), and played around with the program, but haven't been able to find anything, so pointers to relevant information would be a great help.

Comments

• Dec 29, 2018 - 15:48

I've just hit another, slightly different situation. In this case, the original score has 4 verses, starting on different beats in the melody (verse 1 starts with a partial bar, with the first word on the note in that partial bar, verses 2-4 start on the first full bar). The original annotation puts the verse numbers underneath the rest before the first note in that initial part bar. That nicely lines the verse numbers up.

But I don't think I can do that in MuseScore - attaching lyrics to a rest doesn't seem to be supported. The recommendation seems to be to use staff text for such situations, but that would mean manually lining up four numbers with their respective lyric lines, which seems pretty fiddly and error prone to me.

I think I can get it to work by having a dummy note in the same place as the rest in voice 2, and attaching the verse numbers to that, then hiding the voice 2 note, that works, but seems a bit complicated (it's also leaving a visual artifact in the resulting PDF, which may just be because I've done something wrong). Is there a better way?

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• Dec 29, 2018 - 15:59

Hmm, you're right. I'd tried that earlier and forgotten that it sort of worked. The problem is that the lines don't seem to match up with the lyrics for the actual notes. See below.

Verse numbering.png

The "1." is from hitting Ctrl-L on the rest. The "Be" is from hitting Ctrl-L on the Bb note. As you can see, they don't line up. I haven't manually moved any of the text boxes (at least not knowingly - if there's a command to move text back to the default calculated place, I could use that to confirm it, but I don't really want to have to manually adjust the positioning just to get it to work at all...)

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• Dec 29, 2018 - 16:17

Yes, it does, doesn't it? However, it's not - I did check in Inspector :-(
I tried with a new score. Create a score, just a single staff. Note entry, 5 0 5 C, gives a crotchet rest then a middle C.
Select the rest, and hit Ctrl-L and enter "1.", spacebar, then enter some text. You should see that the 1. and the text are not aligned.
It looks to me like it might just be a bug. If that's the case, where should I report it?

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