Add "Favour sharps/flats" in chord names during transposition.
Recently preparing for a gig with excellent musicians, I sent out parts which I had notated in "C" and then transposed.
After putting them in front of the musicians, there were comments such as, "You know, this would be better for me (on a Bb instrument) if the changes said Db instead of C#, Gb instead of F#, etc. Guitar players will of course, prefer the # keys.
As many of you will know it is a great deal of work to go over multiple charts looking for these kinds of issues.
It would be a boon if there was a way to apply a flats or sharps preference to these chord names.
Regards,
Comments
The trick would be figuring out a good algorithm. It really is *not* the case that Db is always preferred over C#, for example - consider a chord progression like C | C#o7 | Dmi7 | G7, which is invariably spelled with the C#, whether you play guitar, trumpet, or anything else. Or C#mi7-F#7-Bma7. If MuseScore tried changing that C# to Db, it would completely destroy the appearance of the ii-V-I. But Dbmi7-Gb7-Cbma7 wouldn't make people any happier.
So while yes sometimes you need to respell things after transposition, coming up with an automated way of detecting the text and figuring out what makes sense is a pretty tall order. Sometimes there is substitute for a human musician looking at things and making his own subjective judgements.
In reply to The trick would be figuring by Marc Sabatella
Maybe expand the respell pitches function to work on chord symbols too?
In reply to Maybe expand the respell by Jojo-Schmitz
Not a bad idea. It is definitely using similar types of subjective heuristics, taking surrounding context into account. And spelling of pitches definitely influence spelling of chords and vice versa, so it makes sense to consider these together.
Not sure anyone has really looked at the respell pitches algorithm in a while, chances are it could stand improvement as well. Probably there should be a dialog box allowing you to configure various options.
In reply to Not a bad idea. It is by Marc Sabatella
Thanks guys - perhaps it can be done.
Marc, your 1st post is clear and outlines some important difficulties.
I am heartened by the conversation so far.
Regards,
In reply to The trick would be figuring by Marc Sabatella
I'm brand-new to Musescore and really blown away by how polished and feature-rich this software is. This is a tremendous gift to the music world.
One of my primary interests in using it is creating lead sheets for songs and then transposing them to keys that fit a given singer's voice. I know others have suggested a find-and-replace feature for notes / measures, and I can imagine that find-and-replace for chord names would also be very useful. Marc makes a great point about how automating (which is a different thing, in my mind) chord renaming could lead to charts that are just bad in different ways, but find and replace would speed up the "human musician looking at things" aspect in some cases. If there are "fundraisers" for specific feature requests, please tip me off. I'd contribute to a fund for dev towards this feature.
Speaking of contributing, I also see Musescore ran into problems with Paypal donations, which is a shame. Folks like me who have been identify theft victims are wary of giving out credit card numbers without researching who receiving and processing our financial information. It might be possible to have differently-priced versions of the mobile apps that allow buyers to "bundle in" a donation. Not a perfect solution, but maybe $15, $30, $50, and $100 versions would allow people to give via that channel.