diagonal lines between RH and LH staves in piano music

• Mar 10, 2019 - 04:28

I'm transcribing a number of songs with piano accompaniment that use diagonal lines between the RH and LH staves to indicate when a voice moves from one hand to the other. For example:
diagonal.png
Is there a standard way to do this in MuseScore? I've tried a couple of different items from the "Lines" menu (e.g. "let ring" and "palm mute"), and while I can get the look I want by turning off "automatic placement" and turning on "allow diagonal", it doesn't last. When I close and reopen the file I discover that these lines have been restored to their default state ("automatic placement" on and "allow diagonal" off). That means that any time I edit one of these files to make any kind of correction, I have to go back and fix the placement of these lines before I can print the file out.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Comments

• Mar 10, 2019 - 17:53

Not a good reason, necessarily, but probably because the implementation internally is very different from the others and it might have seemed difficult to use the same code. Maybe also, it would be difficult to convey using a palette icon how this line type differs from the others, so people might get confused and apply ne type when they meant the other.

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• Mar 10, 2019 - 20:51

There are already lines in that palette that aren't distinguishable except by the text that pops up if you hover over them. And if my experience is any guide, if one is looking for lines, one goes to the "Lines" palette, not to the "Add" menu. So for my part I think adding "note anchored line" to the "Lines" palette would reduce confusion rather than add to it (but maybe that's just me).

Is it a bug that the "let ring" and "palm mute" lines allow you to change their positioning but revert to default position when you close and reopen the file?

Another question: it appears that the "note anchored line" will also allow me to reproduce the following notation:
grouping.png
which I've been using other line types for and running into the same reversion-to-default problem. But I find it strange that if I add begin and end hooks to the line, they don't become visible until I add either a begin or end text as well, even if it's only a space character. Is this behavior intentional?

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• Mar 10, 2019 - 23:06

Yes, and these newly added lnes (they weren't present in 2.0) have already presented problems as users have been confused and added the wrong kind of line, as we've seen from a number of forum threads and issue reports. Still, like I said, it's not necessarily a good reason, and that decision could certainly be revisited. I suggest you file an issue to the tracker (eg, "Support / Issue tracker" in the menu at top of this page) as a "Suggestion".

Yes, the bug with properties of Let Ring and Palm Mute not being saved is known and already being addressed, see #285383: Edits to "let ring" and "palm mute" lost on save/reload

For the notation you show above, you don't need a note-anchored line, a regular line is preferable. Not sure the note anchored line was originally designed to allow hooks at all, which is probably why it's glitchy.

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• Mar 11, 2019 - 01:14

Actually that's not quite true. Early on I tried the vanilla "line" but ran into a very odd symptom, which was that if I tried to make the line slant, crazy things happened with the end hooks. For example, a line that looks perfectly good when horizontal:
line 1.png
looks like this if you try to make it slant even a little:
line 2.png line 3.png
(in all cases, Begin Hook 90°, 1.50sp and End Hook 90°, 1.50sp)
The same symptom doesn't occur with a "note anchored line":
anchored line 1.png
anchored line 2.png anchored line 3.png

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