How can I keep the sharps?

• Feb 29, 2016 - 16:39

Admittedly this is unusual, but there is a reason I want to do it.

The attached score shows four strings of notes. The first, A, is an atonal row for soprano. The second, B, show the same atonal row for soprano and also put into the alto part via a straight copy and paste. The third one, C, shows the effect of starting with the same soprano row, copying it to the alto part, and then lowering it six half steps by hitting the down arrow key six times. As you can see, two notes (the ones with no accidental before) are now flats But I want them to be written as sharps, as in D. In other words, I want all notes in both parts that have accidentals to have sharps only.

Of course I could go in and change all the flatted notes to their sharp equivalents individually, but in a long score mistakes are likely to creep in.

So my question is: is there an easy and accurate way to globally change all those flats in the alto part B to their equivalent sharps?

Thanks for any advice. transposition.mscz


Comments

Move them down one more half tone and then up again, easiest done with the arrow keys.
MuseScore will use flats when moving down and sharps when moving up.

You could also have used Notes / Transpose to do the transposition instead of the arrow keys, which would allow you to preserve proper spelling even if the original had mixed flats and sharps.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I looked at Notes/Transpose, but I couldn't figure out exactly which options to use to make the change I wanted. For instance, if I highlighted a sequence of notes and wanted to transpose them all six half steps down, could you tell me please exactly which options I should enable in the Transpose box?

In reply to by jcorelis

Don't think "number of half steps" - that's not precise in terms of spelling. Eg, six half steps down from C is either F# or Gb depending on how you want it spelled. If you want it spelled F#, that's a diminished fifth. If you want it spelled Gb, that's an augmented fourth. Either way, you say you want to transpose by interval, and specify the interval.

You can select a group of notes with the acccidentals you want to change (including any naturals). If the accidentals are sharps and you want an enharmonic transposition to flats, hit the "up arrow" key once and then the "down arrow key". All the sharps will have changed to flats, leaving any natural notes unaffected (as opposed to using the "j" key, which will re-spell the naturals too).

The process is vice-versa for enharmonic transposition from flats to sharps, of course.

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