Question about placing notes

• Sep 29, 2011 - 09:31

As I've been experimenting with Muse Score, I have noticed there are certain limitations on placing notes. The first one is that I can't place a second voice under any note. It has to start with the first note of the score. The second thing I noticed is that I can't place notes too far apart within a measure or it will create a rest which I don't want.
Is this a case of me not knowing how the software works or is this a problem within the software?


Comments

I'm guessing you are trying to place notes by clicking with the mouse? That's not really an efficient way of doing things, and although it certainly does work, it probably is the source of your confusion, as you seem to be thinking you should be able to click anywhere in a measure and enter a note, independently of whatever else might be in the measure. You should start by reading the section on Note Entry in the Handbook to see how things actually work, and then the section on Voices, as lasconic suggests above.

But when using multple voices, yes, the assumption is that each voice will be complete, with rests for any silent beats, just as music has traditionally been written. If you have some special reason to want to hide rests in some particular measure, you can certainly do that after the fact (right click, set invisible), but initially, MuseScore assumes you want to enter music using conventional notation rules, which say that all beats in all voices should be accounted for. Those rules are in place to make it easier for the person reading the music.

If you want to be able to click here and there and put in notes, one trick is to fill the measures in question with short rests in the voice you're using. I often use eighth rests in 4/4. Then you can click on any of those rests and put in notes of any duration. Your new note will start where that rest was, and gobble up subsequent ones to complete its duration.

-- J.S.

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