(2.0.3) Contrabass not transposing correctly.
Good day fellow MuseScore users! I came here to report a bug that caught me by surprise and on a very VERY bad circumstance.
When pressing the "Concert Pitch" button MuseScore transposes everything correctly, including octaves... Except for the contrabass. When disabling concert pitch mode you still get the bass clef with the "8" underneath (something that should simply not happen, the contrabass sounds an octave lower than written).
I end up having to adjust this manually every time, which doesn't sound that big of a deal... except when the piece you are making is for a competition and little details like these can end up in the piece being eliminated from the contest. Was it my fault? Kind of, for forgetting. But still would not be such a headache if MuseScore transposed it right in the first place.
Will something be done about this little bug?
Thank you,
Luigi
Comments
Can you bring up respected sources that do claim Contrabasses to be transposing instruments?
However, you can set it up as such yourself, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/transposition#change-staff-transposit…
And save as a template, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/create-new-score#templates
Wikipedia claims Double Bass to be transposing by an octave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bass#Pitch
Any more sources?
Should be quite easy to fix, once agreed on and entered in the issue tracker.
Edit: seems you are right and this issue is fixed already (by me ;-), had completly forgotten about that) in 2.0.4 (897e9ad) and master (a5907ba), following a discussion in https://musescore.org/en/node/17623
This isn't a bug, it's how it is intended to work. Contrabass music needs to be displayed an octave higher than it sounds, and there are two different ways this can be done. One way is to define it as a transposing instrument so it displays with standard bass clef even though the pitches are an octave higher. The other way is to use the octave clefs that were specifically introduced for this purpose a century or so ago. MuseScore chooses the latter approach by default, in keeping with how many modern scores are published (and how other software also does things by default). I kind of doubt any competitions would have a problem with this very common approach. but if the rules for some specific competition call for the other approach, that's fine, just go into Staff Properties and set the transposition accordingly, then change the clef.
As mentioned above, the default is already changed for 3.0, but this just means that anyone who prefers the other approach will need to do the adjustment.
Check out my post on this link for how I fix this problem.
https://musescore.org/en/node/48926