Unable to write lyrics to for tunes that move between clefs
I want to have lyrics that follow the melody between the treble and bass clefs for beginner piano students. I have searched your forums and found that this has been an issue for several years and several updates.
There are some work-arounds that have been suggested in the past. The one I have been doing is have the melody and lyrics constantly in the treble clef but make the notes invisible when the notes are best in bass clef. This is confusing my students because there needs to be rests where there is blank space where there are invisible words.
Can you fix this soon? or Is there any way around this (to add in rests without doing it in separate software like PhotoShop) or is there software that can actually be usable to write beginner music? Other than minor bugs, I have enjoyed using this software.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ! B 40 Amazing Grace no lyrics.mscz | 15.12 KB |
| ! B 40 Amazing Grace.mscz | 12.39 KB |
Comments
You can add rests in another voice. For that matter, you don't even need to have added the notes you added in voice 1, you could add rests there and attach the lyrics to those.
Attaching lyrics to rests as the workaround, needs rests following the rhythm, but those could be invisible voice 2 rests.
![Amazing_Grace-lyrics-rests.png]()
![Amazing_Grace-lyrics-bass-above.png]()
Another is to attach then to the bass clef notes and then move them to above staff (needs spacers too though). Would work with full measure rests too.
Downside: neither works well with lyrics dashes and melisma underscores (but see also #295772: Hyphens do not line up when adding lyrics to rests and #295773: Can't add melisma underscores when adding lyrics to rests)
Both on one score, see attached score, 2nd just disabled/invisible, make vilisble and remove the treble clef lyrics to see it in action
Came up again (actually even earlier) in https://musescore.org/en/node/286039
This issue was around in 2017 also: https://musescore.org/en/node/183851
In reply to Attaching lyrics to rests as… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thank you, this will at least be better, though like you said, neither works well with lyrics dashes and melisma underscores. I had tried attaching lyrics to rests, but then they wouldn't line up with proper space. This looks like it'll at least get me by, though still not quite right.
Marc, is there any way to have proper lyrics dashes and melisma underscores?
Lyrics on rests should align correctly in the current version 3.2.3, although it's true they didn't in some older versions. But, the hyphens don't, that looks like a bug that needs to be reported separately.
It's true there is no ideal solution to this currently, I would say. I guess doing the entire melody on the treble staff but marking some notes invisible is the best (with rests added in another voice). It works perfectly, just a bit more work than one might prefer. Still, the very nature of this use case (simple songs for beginners) means we aren't talking about composing entire symphonies this way.
So in other words, take your existing version as is, then add rests another voice where needed. They'll need to be adjusted vertically - apparently hiding the notes note in voice 1 isn't enough to get the rests in other voices to center.
Thank you for your help and work-around suggestions. I have reported the bug with hyphens when with lyrics attached to rests and also melisma underscores. I'm wondering what the likelihood is of these issues being resolved at some point. The work-a-round will get me by for awhile but it's pretty tedious. My hope was to arrange somewhere between 50 and 100 kids' Sunday School songs that can be played by beginner piano students (I have 30 arranged so far, using the invisible notes in the treble clef.) Coming into the Christmas season I am also hoping to arrange many Christmas songs for my beginning students. Is this a possibility?
Its' quite likely it will this will be improved at some point. Whether iot happens by Christmas depends on whether enough people start complaining about this limitation, so it starts to look like one of the more high priority improvements to make.
The lyrics don't seem to line up consistently when attached to rests.
They are aligned perfectly for me, vertically anyhow. As I said, earlier versions of MuseScore did not.
Maybe you mean the spacing, not the alignment? That indeed seems not to work. That should be submitted as a separate bug report.
The lyrics-attached-to-rests feature wasn't really supported originally, I think it was just to support some aspect of import from another file format, then much later it got turned on for everyone since it was there anyhow. But it's flaky to be sure, much of the code still really assumes lyrics are attached to notes only.
I have found something that works for me; looks nice, is musically sound, and isn't too cumbersome. In the 3rd voice (click on the little 3 on the right side of the toolbar), I write the melody all in the treble clef and then make the notes invisible. Next, I attach lyrics to the melody, not invisible. I go back to the beginning of the music and change to 1st voice (a little 1 on the right side of the toolbar) and add the melody in both clefs (over top of the dimmed, invisible notes in the case of the treble clef and down in the bass clef for the notes that go below middle C.)