Transposing
Hi. I have just started looking into Musescore. So far, it appears to have what I need, namely at least 20 staves (I'm mainly interested in big band music) and will extract parts. I have one more question, however, and that is, can I enter everything in concert and then have the program transpose the notes in the individual parts? For example, if I want a concert C major chord, can I write a C in the trumpet part but have the final score (and the parts) show a D in the trumpet part? I found enetering everything in concert much easier than transposing as I go.
Comments
Yes, that is the reason for the concert pitch option. I find it useful for mixed groups of instruments (Bb and concert). For brass band (mainly Bb and Eb) I don't bother. Try not to chop and change too much, though - turn on concert pitch, enter everything and see that it sounds OK, turn concert pitch back off, check that all notes remain in-range for your instruments and then print the parts out. I tend to always save the file with concert pitch off.
In reply to Transposing by underquark
In theory, it *does* work to toggle concert Pitch on and off as much as you like in 1.2. Some older versions would tend to lose courtesy accidentals and even change some enharmonic spellings But I too try to avoid it. Do be sure youenter your chord symbols correctly, or they won't transpose. And by correctly, I mean, according to how the chord style you are using wants them to be. See the Handbook entry on chordnames for more info
BTW, if you're interested in writing big band music, be sure to check out the Jazz Big Band template when creating a score. It has most things already sized and positioned to work pretty well out of the box (eg, landscape orientation, small staves, already set up for 5+4+4+4 big band instrumentation), MuseJazz font for most text elements, etc. Chord name style defaults to the style used by most major jazz publishers today: Cma7, Cmi7, Cmi7b5, Co7, but you can always change it to use one of the other chord styles if you prefer.
What I tend to do is create the score (in concert pitch), then when done turn concert pitch off and go through and add courtesy accidentals, change enharmonic spellings as necessary to make highly chromatic passages more readable. I then save this as my main score. Then I save a copy of the score, call it "parts score", and on that copy I change the scaling and orientation to be appropriate for the parts. I then manually upsize the text elements - which you can do for many elements at once by right clicking, selecting text properties, making your change, and being sure to enable to option to do it for all similar elements. When you generate parts from this score, they look very good with little or not hand-tweaking required. I usually spend less than a minute on each generated part doing things like adding manual line breaks, editing slurs to avoid stems, etc.
Also, I recommend the FluidR3 soundfont (see handbook entry on soundfonts) for much better playback than the default. it's not perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.