Change duration of notes, especially for triplets
I understand the philosophy of MuseScore, that the duration of a note is fixed and if you for instance change a crotchet (quarter note) to minim (half note), this minim will erase the note(s) that follow it to fill the new time. This avoids a measure to be "over full".
Triplets are very rigid. To enter on, one has the enter the note that fills the time that is required, then split this note into a triplet.
Arrangers don't work this way. They put down a melody, then they try to fit the melody into measures. It is a frequent task to change the duration of notes, and at the same time NOT delete any following note. Or to make a triplet into something straight and vice versa.
I enclose a very simple example. How can you change the measure one to measure two without re-entering the notes?
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Comments
This not a proper feature request. What do you expect MuseScore to do exactly?
To answer your question. I would do it like this. Select the F on the second beat, press 5, Ctrl + 3, add A, D. Copy paste, C, D one eight before. Select the B and press 5. I closed this issue. If you have a proper feature request to do open a new issue or discuss it in the forum before.
Thank you. I ran through the steps and it worked.
Actually, this is a proper feature request. The request reads:
Allow to change the duration of **selected** notes by using a tool without having to delete notes (or have them automatically deleted by changing the duration of a preceding note) and re-entering them.
Have a mode where you can change the duration of a note without clobbering the ones after. In this mode, rests can also be deleted and everything shifts forward in the bar.
This needs to cope with overfull measures, if the user makes the notes so long, that the total duration doesn't fit into the bar.
Since I am not the designer of MuseScore, I can't tell you what I want MuseScore to do exactly. I can only tell you, what I am used to in Encore. And that allows you to change duration, the way I described it: Select, Menu: Notes > Change duration. Done. Of course you need to clean up yourself if you left the bar "over full".
You already can change the length of selected notes. But you're not just talking about changing length of notes - you're also talking about *moving* other notes. You can do that too - that's what copy & paste are for. MuseScore just doesn't assume that changing length of a note automatically means you want to move other notes, because much of the time, you actually wouldn't.
There have indeed been a number of threads in the forum discussing the idea of an optional "insert mode", where subsequent notes *did* automatically move as you changed notes earlier in the same measure. There is something like this in Finale, too, and it's occasionally useful. More often, though, I ended up having to delete the notes anyhow, because changing the position of notes changes how they have to be notated (you can't have a half note start on the "and" of 1, for instance). So actually, I find that not having to delete the notes manually makes these sort of changes *faster* in MuseScore than in Finale. Still, like I said, insert mode can occasionally be useful.
I'm not sure there exist a single issue in the tracker that really makes a *specific* proposal for how an "insert mode" might look in MuseScore, so if you can come up with something concrete, that would be great!
"Arrangers don't work this way. They put down a melody, then they try to fit the melody into measures."
I'm curious. I find this odd, myself. For any piece I compose, arrange or orchestrate, time is such a vital part of it. Everything I do is time- as well as pitch- bound. How can you separate them? And why?
Regards,
OK, let me be more specific.
I've been using Encore for more than 10 years. It has a different philosophy:
When you delete a note, you don't get a rest, the remaining notes of the bar move forward.
You can insert a note between two others and the remaining notes will shift back, if there is space.
You can drag notes around, change their order.
You can change the duration of the notes, make them longer and shorter. The following notes shift accordingly.
Of course, when you change four crotchets to four minims, you have a problem, as your bar is now 200% full. Encore allows you to do that, and you need to clean it up manually later.
As Marc stated above, an "insert note" would be useful. The reverse operation is a "delete note" which will then shift the remaining notes forward and insert rests at the end of the bar.
I would imagine it as a "float mode": You enter "float mode" and can move everything around in the bar. When you exit "float mode", you will be required to assure to make the notes fit, so you can't exit when the bar is over-full. Or there can be an option to leave "float mode" and discard the notes that don't fit.
Anyway, that's not what you wanted to know. You were enquiring about the process of arranging.
Yesterday I wanted to capture a little arrangement. It's all ad lib, so I don't really count when I play it. I just know the little filler in bar 3 I am playing. To write it down, I needed to fiddle with the duration of the notes a little. And sadly, in MuseScore, this sort of thing is harder to do than in MuseScore. I attach the first few bars.