Accidentally discovered "swing" is no longer global! Whaaaa?
I was baffled and frustrated because I was trying to get a composition to swing, but going into the "Style..." requester and setting it didn't seem to have any effect. I made a new score and tested it: worked just fine there. I thought maybe some 16-note triplets were causing it to malfunction. No, apparently not. Then I tried putting a 16-th note run at the beginning of my piece, and there it swung.
I moved my test notes around, and found that my 16-th note swing time stopped right where I'd added some text from the Text palette. Specifically, the word "Swing," before I'd changed it to "slightly slower." I'd assumed that text in the text palette was, well, just text! Adding "Expression" or "System Text" never affected playback before! (I assume those two still don't. (fingers crossed)) And I thought "swing" was a global effect. Apparently not any more!
Now I just have to figure out how this magic is done. I would love to be able to go in and out of swing time on purpose, if I can only find the secret mechanism to do so . . .
Comments
The 'Swing' text has changed from being a simple word to (nowadays) activating the feature.
See:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/swing
In reply to The 'Swing' text has changed… by Jm6stringer
I would never have thought to look for it as a property of "System Text," although I guess I can't think of where else it would go, either. Everything else that is an ongoing change to the music has its own symbol; time signature, tempo change, key signature, dynamics, et cetera. Weird.
To be clear: the way to enable swing is to add the text from the palette, simple as that. It already comes as system text so it affects all staves, so you don't need to do anything special to make it happen. The only time you need to mess with properties settings is in the unusual cases where you don't want it to apply to all staves. And no, don't use swing text to do something other than turn swing on or off - just use regular staff or system text for that. Otherwise you will indeed need to use properties to disable the playback effect.
In reply to To be clear: the way to… by Marc Sabatella
I'm not sure that actually made things clearer. Because "Swing" overrode my style-configured swing settings, I may never use it, since I am unlikely to find its default satisfactory. Or maybe I switch to only using system text to set up swing rhythm, and ignore the setting in the style menu. Except that with a fair number of my charts, the fact that one should swing the beat is so obvious that to put text on the score saying that would be needless clutter.
The "Add-->Text" menu actually adds a couple of different kinds of text, as well as things that aren't capital-T Text at all. Rehearsal marks, for example, or chord symbols. As far as I know, under MuseScore 2.x, Text (staff, system, or lyrics) was how you pasted words onto your sheet music, but that's pretty much all Text did; it just sat there, quietly. MuseScore 3.x Text, it turns out, has hidden powers.
The text in the palette includes both 'generic' forms of the addable Text items from the menu, and ones where those hidden powers have been activated along with having some textual formatting applied (bold, font size, et cetera). Except for "Expression," that is, which has formatting applied but not any hidden powers. Since I can't tell just by looking which palette items are staff text and which are system text, nor if they have had attributes set, I'll definitely be ignoring all of it until I've had a chance to go through and examine each item. I'll probably throw most of them off the palette.
System text can do two things. It can change the Swing setting for all staves at a certain point, and it can do a "MIDI Action." I don't know anything about those, but since I'm not driving MIDI instruments with MuseScore, in my case, the answer might well be "not that much." Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if the sound engine running inside MuseScore was at least partially MIDI-driven, so if I really wanted to get into using MuseScore as a sequencer, that might be A Thing.
Staff text can do four things. The previous two, plus "Change Channel" and "Capo Settings." All I know about the latter is it's a Guitar Thing, so Guitar People might know what to do with that. "Change Channel" is equally mysterious. I can assign voices (which I'm pretty sure means the blue, green, red and brown notes kind of voices) to...well, all it offers me at the moment is "normal."
Do "arco" and "mute" do anything? I can't find anything that seems "set" when I place them. Gah! "Tremolo" did something, and whatever it did changed my instrument in some bizarre permanent way. Deleting "tremolo" didn't put things back; my plucked acoustic bass is still transformed to a bowed bass in the middle of my score. Or did "arco" do that? But I placed "arco" on my piano staff, not the bass staff. WTF? Since I can't figure out what any of them actually does, un-do-ing what they did will be extremely difficult.
"Close Score without Save" "Re-open Score" I'm glad I hadn't done a bunch of work before realizing my instruments were messed up. "Remove 'Text' palette from sidebar." That palette seems to be a booby-trapped quagmire of non-discoverability.
In reply to I'm not sure that actually… by snarke
First, I think you may be confused - the swing text is not at all new with MuseScore 3. it was added for MuseScore 2, back in 2015. Ever since then it has been the preferred way to add swing to a score. The old style setting for swing is really not intended to ever be used anymore and hasn't been since MuseScore 2. It is maintained only for compatibility witb MuseScore 1 scores, before MuseScore 2 provided a a better way. All current scores should be using the Swing text from the palette, which is easier to add and gives more control. It's actually quite possible we'll remove the old style option some day so people don't accidentally continue to use it, given that it doesn't play well with the correct method.
Swing is hardly the only type of text that can do more than just look pretty. arco and pizz, also mute and open,, all have playback. Same with instrument change. And then there are tempo text and the various repeat text - DS al Coda, etc. Oh yeah, and dynamics. All of these are text elements that affect playback and have for many years. And soon, it's quite likely chord symbol playback will be supported as well. You may also be hearing playback support for some other markings soon.
You can easily customize the swing settings of the palette text, just right click and use System Text Properties. If you prefer a different default, then just add one to a score, customzie it as desire,d then add that back to the palette for future re-use. And as with any element in MuseScore, pressing "V" makes it invisible,
You shouldn't need to think hard about which text elements are system text and which are not. It's designed to be intuitive - the ones that everyone would expect to apply to all staves even though they traditionally only appear on the top staff. Rehearsal marks, tempo texts, repeat tex t all of these are universally attached to the top staff only but apply to all of them, so they are implemented as system text without you needing to think about about it. Same with swing.
When in doubt, just add one to a staff other than the top. If it appears on the top, it's system text. Or add it then look at the status bar,
Again , none of this is new in any way whatsoever, it's the same way it's been for years.
In reply to First, I think you may be… by Marc Sabatella
"It's actually quite possible we'll remove the old style option some day so people don't accidentally continue to use it, given that it doesn't play well with the correct method." I would be in favor of this.
My main beef is not that "Swing" has an effect, it's that it's mixed in with other text that does NOT. "Largo" has an effect, but it's not in the Text palette. "ff" has an effect, but it's not in the Text palette. "Lyrics" don't affect playback, but they're not in the Text palette, or any palette.
I don't prefer a different default setting for Swing. I adjust it on a per-chart basis. A Basie-style chart for my jazz choir might be 70% on eights. The piece I was working on today was 65% on sixteenths.
And D.S. al Coda et. al. definitely was dead text in MuseScore 2. I was delighted when I could upgrade to 3 and not have MuseScore sail right off the end of the main body and into the coda as the next measure when I was playing a song back.
"Rehearsal marks, tempo texts, repeat text all of these are universally attached to the top staff only but apply to all of them, so they are implemented as system text without you needing to think about about it." They might well be implemented as {system text}, but they are not "System Text". They are their own musical elements. I had inferred that this was, in fact, an intentional design decision. If a symbol could affect playback, then it would be identified as such and grouped with other symbols and labels that had a similar effect. "System Text" and "Staff Text" were what one would use if one wanted to pin to a point in the score textual information that MuseScore did not yet, or could not, interpret. "Gently," or "with abandon," or "(narration)", or a spoken cue. It is unexpectedly and confusingly inconsistent for asymmetric subdivision to be overlaid on the System Text element.
In reply to "It's actually quite… by snarke
To be clear though D.S. al Coda et. al. definitely was dead text in MuseScore 2
It most definitely was not, before 2.1 getting the correct playback out of them was less intuitive; but ever since 2.1 most voltas and jumps (even including repeats if you check that) simply do play back.
In reply to "It's actually quite… by snarke
DS al Coda has worked since MuseScore 1. There are cases where if your roadmap is nonstandard MuseScore might not e able to handle it, but the clause cases have always worked.
We try to make all symbols playback as executed where possible. I don’t think most people would appreciate having things on the palette that are capable of playing back correctly but we disable simg to avoid mixing playing and non-playing symbols. But if it bothers you personally, you are welcome to create a new custom palette and move things around to suit your unique preferences. While you are at it, you may wish do the same for the Articulations palette, also Arpeggios and Glissandi, also Lines, all of which have - again, for many years now - contained a mix of symbols where playback support is implemented and others where it is not.
In reply to DS al Coda has worked since… by Marc Sabatella
Well, what I would like is to be able to tell them apart.
In reply to Well, what I would like is… by snarke
The other part of the issue then is, some of those that don't have a playback effect now, could get it in a future update. Or those that don't have their playback effect enabled by default (like a fermate and it's time stretch effect).
In reply to First, I think you may be… by Marc Sabatella
Oh, and apologies for sounding grumpy. I do think that MuseScore is an astonishingly good program overall.