Find in Musescore and enharmonic notes
Hello. How do you search for a flat- or sharp-signs in Musescore?
Another thing: I wrote a piece in a-minor and used a-flats. A friend of mine told that they should be g-sharps, because it is the leading tone in harmonic a-minor. If I had in that piece with say a f-sharp or g-flat, which would be correct? What are the rules of these enharmonic notes and where could I read more about use of them? Thanks in advance.
Comments
my two cents
See: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/note-input
in particular https://musescore.org/en/handbook/note-input#change-pitch
See palettes https://musescore.org/en/handbook/palette
In reply to my two cents See: by Shoichi
Thank you but that didn’t answer my question at all, perhaps I was unclear and you misunderstood me. I knew all that of course having used Musescore many years. I meant using Find-command in Edit menu which I have not needed until now. My idea was to find all the a-flats and replace them with g-sharps. Is it possible and how to do it? Of course that can be done by hand one by one but it is quite slow and I might miss some cases.
In reply to Thank you but that didn’t by simmarama
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Have you already seen these?
https://musescore.org/en/node/116281
https://musescore.org/en/node/110646
There is no "find and replace" command that would allow you to change all Ab to G# at once with no other changes. However, there are other ways of getting the job done. Easiest in your case would be to press Ctrl+A to select all, down arrow to lower everything half a step, then up arrow to raise it again. The result will be *all* accidentals spelled as sharps instead of flats. That won't always be what you want, but it probably is in this particular case.
The rules for how to spell accidentals are pretty complex, as they depend on lots of things - the key, the specific harmony in effect at that point, whether the line resolves up or down, and the spelling of surrounding notes. This all requires a certain understanding of theory to get right, so I guess the place to start is with a basic music theory course - something that explains scales, keys, and chords.
In reply to There is no "find and by Marc Sabatella
Thank you all. I found that especially Marc’s clever suggestion in how to solve my find-and-replace problem was very fast and painless. It saved me a lot of time and didn’t cause any problems.
As to the rules of enharmonic notes in composing I found the site at http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/12238/should-one-write-or-b helpful for me. I understand that those discussed rules are only basic but they help me to go on.
See these:
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/34570/using-the-correct-enharm…
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/23976/why-do-notes-have-multip…
http://www.musicarrangers.com/star-theory/p17.htm
As for relevancy to real usage, I'm not sure - but they all seem sound.
Do note that when writing for the harp, enharmonic equivalents are recommended (though showing them is optional) and need not follow the concert key (a harp can be left in C-flat major throughout the entire piece).