Notating chant
I'm new to these forums, so if these questions have already been answered, please point me in the right direction, and forgive my lack of experience with MuseScore!
I've been trying to enter Russian Orthodox chants, with some success, and some annoyances!
What works:
1. Unicode (wonderful!)
2. Inserting spaces in one syllable (took some finding, but ctrl-space does it)
2. Stemless notes
3. Hiding time signature
4. Short lines (with use of horizontal frames from Create/Bars/Insert Horizontal Frame and line break)
5. Multiple verses
What I can't get to work:
1. Alignment of lyrics: each syllable seems to be a separate text box, moveable left/right and up/down.
I can't find any way to align them horizontally (once moved) or vertically, except by eye.
Is there any kind of "snap to grid" option?
2. Movement of notes: I want to move the chanting note to the left (or near the left) of the chant. I can move the lyric, but that leaves a big gap to the left of the note.
The attached file shows how far I've got.
Any suggestions?
David
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Liturgy.mscz | 3.31 KB |
Comments
Lyrics are centered to their note. Unless follows by an _, in which case that get right-aligned (1st Char under the note.
You can move a note horizontally with the arrow keys after a double click, not htat stems follow only after you left this edit more (by pressing esc). See http://musescore.org/en/handbook/edit-mode
In reply to Lyrics are centered to their by Jojo-Schmitz
Moving notes horizontally works perfectly - thank you for that!
I can't get the underscore to do any aligning of lyrics - all it does is to remove the hyphen at the end, so I must be doing something wrong.
I've now been reminded of another annoyance: ctrl-z doesn't undo movement of lyric text blocks and that's something of a problem if (say) an inadvertent left-arrow at the start of a second syllable moves it under the first syllable.
The nudge provided by left-arrow at the start or right-arrow at the end of a text block is useful, but it's a bit coarse, and there doesn't seem to be an equivalent up-down variant.
David
In reply to Thanks Jojo for the speedy response by dwk
You's need 2 underscores. But then you'd a) occypy the next node and b) you loose the hyphen ;-)
In reply to Thanks Jojo for the speedy response by dwk
To be clear, the *purpose* of underscore has nothing to do with alignment - it is simply to enter the extenders typically used to indicate melisma. nd indeed, it is normally incorrect to useboth hyphens and extenders on the same syllable. But yes, it does happen to be the case (possibly a bug) that when you use underscore in this way - to indicate a melisma - it does apparently have the side effect of left-aligning the preceding syllable. Not going to be helpful here unless you specifically want to indicate a melisma, though (meaning the next note woulod have no lyric under it, just the extender).
Horizontal nudging with left/right is in 1sp units. Combine that with ctrl to get 0.1sp, or with alt to get 0.01sp.
As for vertical nudging, there are indeed certain situations where that might be useful, but normally, it shouldn,t be - everything should already be vertically aligned. If you don't like *where* it is aligned, see the various Style settings dealing with lyrics (there are some under General / Page, others under Text / Lyric (separate odd and even line settings). You can also multi select a group of lyrics and ctrl-drag to move them as a group if you want just a few adjacent lyrics to be lower than the rest.
In reply to Not sure what kind of by Marc Sabatella
Thanks Marc
I've deleted the lyrics and started again, and it's much better now that I know how to nudge notes and lyrics.
I think once you double-click on a "syllable" and move it with the mouse, you are dead, because you can't undo it and you can't nudge vertically. Undo seems to be very limited when you move lyrics.
Now I've got to get quicker or it will take me days to enter a page, but at least I can see how to do the job now.
Thanks for the speedy help.
David
In reply to Thanks Marc I've deleted the by dwk
I produce a plainchant gradual in modern notation every week for our service sheet.
I will be very happy to assist you should you run into further problems :)
Regards
Michael
In reply to Thanks Marc I've deleted the by dwk
Undo might not always work, but Ctrl-R (aka layout / reset position) always does. So o, you are never out of luck if you move something - it's always just a single click to reset it. Better than undo, because reset can be done at any time, in any order.
Looks like for 2.0 things will be different. While nudging of text via keyboard doesn't currently work, you can constrain drags to be horizontal or vertical (shift & ctrl). Not sure if they are planning to add nudging back or not.
In reply to Undo might not always work, by Marc Sabatella
Better and better! Thanks Marc (and to Michael for the offer of general help).
What a friendly and helpful forum!
I'll be telling my colleagues worried about the demise of Sibelius :-)
David