Problem with note entry in the lower staff of two linked staves.

• Sep 14, 2016 - 03:09

Hi-

I am trying to set up a practice score with two linked staves. After entering notes, lyrics, and chord symbols in the upper staves, I find that when I try to enter notes in the lower staves, the cursor arrow displays several ledger lines forming a ladder up the upper stave. I can't entry notes in just the lower linked stave. What do I need to do to switch my note entry to the lower stave without involving the upper stave. Several searches of the handbook and inspection of the menu bars and palettes, etc, have failed to shed light on this problem. Who can help me here?

Thanks,
Glenn

Comments

• Sep 14, 2016 - 13:34

Ciao glennw1, the second image is in English ;-)
However, as per the handbook (see link above):
Right-click on the bar;
Stave Properties -> put the check on 'Invisible stave lines'.
Then, same dialog box:
Advanced Style Properties... -> uncheck 'Show clef'.

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• Sep 14, 2016 - 15:38

Sochi-

Thanks. I should explain I have only been working for one week on Muse Score, so I am very much a newbie.
When I create a piano score the bar lines connect both staves. I want the bar lines within the staves only. How do I hide the those sections of bar lines that are in between the two staves?
I could also use a SATB double stave, but I don't want the brackets on the left ends of the staves.
Alternatively, how do I hide the SATB brackets?

Glenn

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• Sep 14, 2016 - 16:22

Sochi-

Let me explain that I ask questions here only after I can't find the answers in the manual, which is often quite terse.
I tried the method above, but I was unable to remove the bar lines from in between the staves only as I wanted. What am I missing?

Thanks

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• Sep 14, 2016 - 16:47

Some basic things here:

A score containing a number of "instruments", each of which might have one or more "staves", and those staves may or may not be "linked".

What "linked" means here has nothing to do with barlines - it means that anything entered into one staff automatically enters into the other as well, and it's intended so oyu can have a standard and tablature staff showing the same music. You wouldn't normally ever use linked staves unless you are using tablature.

Barlines are normally drawn throw all staves of a single instrument - eg, the two staves of music for piano. If you don't want the barlines drawn through both staves, then probably you actually want two separate instruments. But you can force MuseScore to not draw barlines through staves of a single instrument, or to draw them through multiple instruments. Just double click any barline then drag the handle as desired.

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• Sep 15, 2016 - 18:52

Thanks-that did the trick. My error was assuming that linked staves were the way to go here.

My next two questions are first, how do I delete the measure numbers at the beginning of the staves, and second, how do I format the score to have 4 measures per line?
I tried searching the the online handbook without success for the answers to these question, therefore I am asking them here.

You all should know that I have a possible harmonica book deal in the works, and if we go to publication with it I will be making an acknowledgement in my introductory comments to the MuseScore community for all that help given to me here.

Thanks again,
Glenn

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• Sep 15, 2016 - 22:58

Sochi, et al:

I was able to set line breaks for every four bars, but in the first line the software counted the pickup measure as a bar, throwing off the layout. How do you get five measures in the top line and four measures per line for the rest of the score?

Thanks,
Glenn

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 00:51

You can insert 'hard' system/line breaks anywhere you wish from the F9 Breaks and Spacers palette. This will allow you to override MuseScore's automatic layout algorithm and break each system after a specific measure.

Note that forcing music into a fixed number of measures per system is not generally a good idea for a number of reasons. Performers have difficulty differentiating one system from another when they all look alike, and it's easy for them to get lost when music is printed in that manner. Only for instructional material is this sort of notation appropriate.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 03:11

Recorder-

I need to be be able to lay out music that will be printed in a book. So I would like to have all the lines go all the way across the page without having a short system at the end of the piece. Seeing as most of these scores will be 16 bars with a 1 beat pickup, four bars to the lines seemed like a good way to begin. The measures won't be of equal width within the systems, though.
Is there another, better way I should be convincing of this?

Glenn

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 15:14

Isaac is right about the last system fill threshold causing those short last systems, but while setting that to a very high number will indeed force last systems to spread, this can cause a different problem for you. It sometimes happen that the last system doesn't contain enough material to look properly filled when it is spread out across the entire page, and the only way to fix that is to either squeeze the music before it, so as to eliminate that system entirely, or to spread out the music before it so as to fill that last system better.

The way to do this is with 'Stretch', which can be added or removed incrementally to any measure, system, or section (or even an entire score) to tighten or loosen the lateral spacing of notes. To tighten things up, select the area you want affected, then type { a number of times. To spread things out, select the material and type }.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 04:03

Isaac-that fix worked, thanks. I will now try to set up a piece of music and post it the forum in hopes of obtaining feedback and advice from the experts who so kindly give of their time here.
If further questions arise I will let you know.

Thanks,
Glenn

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 05:04

Isaac-that fix worked, thanks. I will now try to set up a piece of music and post it the forum in hopes of obtaining feedback and advice from the experts who so kindly give of their time here.
If further questions arise I will let you know.

Thanks,
Glenn

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 17:37

Isaac, or anyone else-

One more question-I need to set up a score with two repeating 8-bar sections, each beginning with a 1-beat pickup, and set up four bars per line, not counting pickups. How do I do that?

Glenn

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 19:05

Mark-

Thanks. That worked. I just set up my first harmonica score, which is attached. I need to insert text saying "G-harmonica over the first pickup measure. How do I do that?

Also, I note that the diagonal eighth note beams are slightly serrated, whereas the horizontal ones are cleanly defined. Is that being addressed in development? A publisher may have an issue with that.

Thanks,
Glenn

Attachment Size
Magpie.mscz 13.24 KB

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 19:11

To insert text, see the Handbook under "Text" - probably Staff Text is what you want. In general, you might want to spend some time perusing the Handbook, and watching the tutorial videos, as a lot of common questions are answered within.

As for the serration you see, that would be an artifact of the scaling done to display the score on screen. The print won't have that issue.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 19:50

If you are looking at the PDF on screen, you are seeing what I described - artifacts of the scaling that software does to displays things on screen. Screens are generally not as high resolution as printers, that's just how things generally look. It is perfectly normal that diagonal lines viewed on screen will be a big jagged.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 19:52

You can of course freely move text once added, but sure, if you want it at the top of the score and not looking like it is attached to a specific place in the score (which is how you originally described it), then yes, putting in the frame makes more sense. And that's what the lyricist field does.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 22:55

I note that the diagonal eighth note beams are slightly serrated, whereas the horizontal ones are cleanly defined. Is that being addressed in development? A publisher may have an issue with that.

In digital imagery--as opposed to continuous-tone photographic imagery--everything one sees on a screen is made up of small units called 'pixels'. This is similar to the way photographs were printed on non-photographic paper in the pre-digital age, as 'half-tones' made up of tens of thousands of dots of varying size, which were created by re-photographing the original continuous-tone image through screens of various fineness. A photograph for a high-quality magazine or book would be printed on coated stock at 300 dpi (dots-per-inch); a photograph for a newspaper, printed on rough-surfaced newsprint stock, would be screened at 65 dpi, and would be correspondingly coarser in appearance.

In digital imagery, the pixel replaces the half-tone dot, but pixels are square and are aligned in vertical columns and horizontal rows. Thus, no matter how fine the digital 'screen' one uses in creating the original digital image--digital cameras rated at 50+ megapixels now exist, although their usefulness is limited to the extreme upper end of the professional spectrum--if you blow up the resulting image large enough, you will see the outlines of the individual pixels on any image line which is not parallel to either the x or y axes (rows or columns).

Thus, if you enlarge a Musescore-generated PDF, at some point you will see the edges of each pixel in the sloped beams and in the curved contours of notes, symbols, and clefs.

But this does not matter to a publisher, as when he prints your score, he can adjust the settings in his printer-driver to a finer resolution that will make that effect invisible to the naked eye. In addition, most publishers will not print from your PDF, but will either ask you for a music-xml file (which you can export from MuseScore), or for your original mscz file (if they use MuseScore themselves). Failing that, they will manually re-enter the music into their own notation program and re-format it to match their house style. For submision purposes, therefore, the printable quality of your PDF is pretty much irrelevant, as long as it can be read by a human editor.

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• Sep 16, 2016 - 23:32

Recorder-

Thanks for clarifying the above. Mark's previous response was also enlightening.
Today I submitted to my publisher a sample score on PDF that I created with notation, guitar chords, and harmonica tablature after about 9 days of studying the program, and he thought it looked fine. So we are going ahead with a book. He had not heard of MuseScore but said he would recommend it to authors who didn't have one of the store-bought engraving programs.
So thanks again, everybody. I'm sure I'll back with another question or two, but I'm good for now.

- Glenn

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• Sep 17, 2016 - 02:32

Isaac-thanks for clarifying.
The book deal I was able to arrive at today means that a MuseScore generated book will be in the catalog of Hal Leonard, the world's largest music publisher. I don't know if your software has previously been able to claim that distinction, but as of today, MuseScore can.

-Glenn

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