Dangling "8" under the staff

The ‘dangling 8’ is used for instruments whose tones are an octave below the tones normally associated with the treble staff.
For instance guitar music actually sounds an octave lower than its notation on the treble staff would imply. That is why, guitar sheet music has sometimes an ‘dangling 8’ below
the treble clef but most of the time they left that out.
Joe.

The double bass is written with a normal bass clef, and it is assumed to sound an octave lower than written. While a few modern examples use the 8vb marking, it is not standard.

This is a problem in MuseScore particularly with writing double bass music that uses tenor clef (a common practice for higher-register passages), because there is no 8vb tenor clef available.

Hardly a conspiracy I assure you -- simply me searching on Google for an answer, finding this thread, and then posting a more formal bug report elsewhere. Not that pointing out errors would constitute an atmosphere of victimization or anything... ;-)

Thanks for your work on this - it is truly appreciated.

FWIW, this is one of the reasons I have argued elsewhere that the score creation wizard should provide easy access to the staff properties - so one doesn't have to go in afterwards and clean things up.

Regarding bass specifically, it should be noted that the convention of using the bass-8 clef with no transposition is pretty common these days. I think that's primarily because notation software makes this an easy way of doing things. If you set up bass to be a transposing instrument using ordinary bass clef, the downside is that it is very difficult to read or writre bass at concert pitch - too many ledger lines below the staff. The bass-8 clef is a clever way to make the bass part readable at concert pitch, and then, since that puts all the notes exactly where they need to be in the transposed score or parts, it's just as easy to simply leave the bass-8 clef in there and not mess with transposition. When I look at scores produced in the past 25 years or so (since computer-based notation software became available to the masses), it's pretty common to see it done this way.

It would be better, I suppose, if you could set up MuseScore to use bass-8 for concert pitch but then switch to regular bass clef, with octave transposition, when you turned concert pitch off. This is especially important for instruments that transpose at the ninth, like tenor sax, or other intervals larger than the octave. You want concert scores to use a clef that makes the part readable, but you want the transposed score/part to be in the right key and use the appropriate clef. There is an outstanding feature request to add this: the ability to have different clefs for concert pitch versus transposed.

Anyhow, that's some of the "why" things are as they are. For people who want to write bass as a transposing instrument with ordinary bass clef (the little 8 doesn't bother the actual players - most are pretty accustomed to seeing that by now, I would have to assume), then indeed, going to staff properties and setting up the transposition is the way to go. But you'll have to deal with the fact that the part will be largely unreadable when displaying the score at concert pitch, unless you plan to manually switch between clefs every time you toggle the Concert Pitch button. But if you write for bass high enough to need tenor clef (not really very common in my experience), then you probably have no choice but to use this method, since indeed, the bass-8 clef approiach won't play with tenor clef. I guess you write for tenor clef an octave too high delberately, and live with incorrect playback.

"and I'll concede that guitar is debatable although I've only seen evidence of the octave clef usage for guitar in the more modern scores"
See: https://musescore.org/en/node/38581#comment-368706