Grand staff instruments

• Mar 24, 2009 - 06:57

Attached is what you get when starting a new score in version 0.9.4 with grand staff instruments. Two things should be corrected:
1. The barlines should cover the whole height of each grand staff. It is not unusual that the organ grand staff has its barline broken between the second and third staves (counted from the top), but when the brace covers all three staves the barlines should do the same.
2. The accordion should have a brace.

Attachment Size
Grand staff instruments.pdf 10.22 KB

Comments

These things are able to be added. As for number 1, just double click any bar line, then drag it down to the desired staff and you get bar lines of full length for the entire score. I would hesitate to make this automatic as it is such a simple fix and not always desired: for example, if lyrics are to be placed between the staffs..
As for number 2; I am not that familiar with accordion music, but my understanding is that the left and right hands play completely differently, maybe this is the reason that the brace was not included. Or maybe the 2nd staff is not always needed--I'm not sure what, if anything, happens if you delete a staff connected to another staff by a brace. Or it could just be an oversight. Who knows? Anyhow, the brace is also simple to add; just drag it from the pallet to the first measure, then double click and drag it to encompass the desired number of staffs.

I will add a brace for the accordion later today. This is a simple fix.

Adding a bar line across the whole height of each grand staff is a more complicated fix that I will leave to someone else. As a partial workaround for this problem you can use the Piano template which I add partly for this very reason.

In reply to by David Bolton

To make the grand staff a default when writing for piano might not be a good idea, but making it an intial OPTION would be. For example, if one is writing hymns or anywhere 4 or more vocal parts are the objective as well as the accompaniment, the grand staff would have to be eliminated. Perhaps a place for selecting the desired option would be in the instruments>keyboard selection, or the dialog box for time signature, etc.

In reply to by David Bolton

Lots for me to learn about what's already here!! Hymn template exists. That's good. Removing bar line for lyrics is a good idea. Thanks everyone for the MuseScore education for this amateur!! It's really been a challenege to get around to all the options unless you know they exist!!! I really do like this program.

In reply to by David Bolton

I am not sure where to post this so I put it here. One problem mentioned is the lyrics and descending stems collide. One way to handle this is to just hit the Enter key when first entering your lyrics which drops you to the next lyric line, in effect putting a blank lyric line in at each note and thus avoiding the collision. Since I already had everything finished and could not easily find a way to move all the lyrics down I saved my file as .xml then used a text editor. The lines needing adjustment are 'lyric number="xxx"' where xxx is the number 1 for lyric line 1, 2 for line 2 etc. I had three lines of lyrics so I set the numbers from 1,2,3 to 2,3,4 and had no line 1. It worked just fine. I saved the file, loaded it back into mscore and then I saved it with the standard default extension and all was good.' This method would work fine too if you want to open up a lyric group to put in a new line for some reason. Messing around with XML files isn't that hard. Just save a copy before you start changing so if you break something you can go back to the original.

In reply to by Nmaron

nmaron, you can also increase the margin between the staff and music without editing the XML file.

  1. Style > Edit General Style to open the style window
  2. In the left pane choose "Page"
  3. In the right pane increase the "Lyric's upper margin"

In reply to by David Bolton

Altering the general stave to lyric distance is all very well, but sometimes you only need to create extra space on one or just a few lines, but not all of them. Furthermore, as the music stretches automatically as you type to accommodate the words, you may find that the bit of music you need to add extra separation to has moved to the next line, so using the Enter key at the beginning of the line as suggested may end up adding clearance where it's not wanted. What is needed it to be able to increase spacing locally after everything has been entered, just like you can locally change the inter stave distance.

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