accidentals change all by themselves

• Aug 15, 2012 - 14:14

I have a symphonic band score I'm working on. It is in the key of D sharp. On some notes (ones intentionally changed: not within the key signature), the score creates flats instead of the equivalent sharp. It seems to want to revert to that notation after I work with the score and save it. I laboriously go in and change every flatted note back to its equivalent sharp. Then, it changes again (esp. after creating parts). Any ideas on what is going on?


Comments

Hard to say without seeing the score (the actual MSCZ file). But I'm confused. First, there normally is no such thing as a key of D sharp. Are you saying the key signature has sharps on every staff line, and double sharps on the C and F? That's what a key of D# would mean. Maybe you mean D# minor? That's only six sharps. In which case, the only note note already sharped would be B. So the only sharp you would ever be adding would be B sharp. But sure what flat that could possible be turning into.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

My mistake. I actually meant just plain old Dma (concert key). At any rate, I have corrected the problem (manually, yet again) and haven't had any more mysterious changes. But, wouldn't I be correct in my thinking that having a bunch of flats in the key D is sort of confusing to the player? Wouldn't you want all accidentals to be sharps?

In reply to by Timothy Osburn

Not necessarily. The usual convention is to use flats for chromatically describing lines, like B-Bb-A. Also if the chord is, say, Gmi (the iv chord, which is fairly common), then it would be incorrect to spell the third as A#. So no, you can't generally you always want accidentals to be sharps in the key of D.

Anyhow, once you've entered an accidental, it should stay that way unless you change it. If you ever come up with a case where this happens again and is reproducible, don't hesitate to post the score - that is usually the only way bugs can be found and fixed. But FWIW, I've entered thousands of measures into MuseScore and never once seen anything like this. So it may have been some sort of fluke, and you'll probably never see it again.

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