Two notes in one place

• Dec 4, 2012 - 19:55

If you are writing four part piano textures it is quite normal for there to be inside voices which move - say in quavers - while the 4th or 5th fingers of each hand hold down, say, a chord of two minims above and below the quaver texture. In such cases you sometimes need to have a note which is a kind of siamese twin: half of it is say a minim, and the rest of it is the first quaver of the inside voice. You'll find such moments all over the 48, for example. I have managed to get MuseScore to do something along these lines but it does not look right (Ex 1) Trying to get round the problem however (Ex 2) leads to a strange-looking piece of writing for piano on 3 staves. I calculated: better to write a strange bit which could at least be decoded than getting lost in the many obstacles to writing something Bach or Mendelssohn would have done in a twentieth of a second. Incidentally in Ex2 we also see a classic example of MuseScore miscounting the correct number of beats in the bar and short-changing me by a crotchet. It gives rests for a 5/8 bar but I am asking for a 7/8 one. And it has nothing to do with tuplets this time. I got have round it by invisibilizing the last rest, and using symbols to create notes outside the Program's metrical discipline for my last two LH notes of the bar - the A and the D a 12th below. In such circumstances I have no control over note head direction Ex2MuseScore.JPG There is another A in the stave above (not shown in the clip) as well as minims D and A. Hence: two notes in one place. Normally I would write all that on one line, but it seems that would be out of the question with MuseScore. But on the credit side, I had an inspiration while working on this: and this really would tax programmers! What is needed is manuscript paper - or virtual manuscript paper - which has a certain 3D aspect. You'd need to have staves in perspective slant behind one another. Then notes which texturally are behind others could be entered in the best possible visual and tactile place, and good legibility - indeed improved legibility - could be enjoyed!

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Ex2MuseScore.JPG 34.49 KB
Ex1MuseScore.JPG 36.65 KB

Comments

Usually posting an acutal score is more helpful than posting a picture of it. You don't say what you don't like about the version in Ex1. Looks normal to me, except there is what appears to be a fermata or slur that is overlapped by the low C in the bottom staff - is that what you mean? If so, simply move it (double click & arrow or drag). Or perhaps you mean, you wish the either note low C to start on the second eighth of the measure? If so, you simply need to start out that voice with an eighth rest - exactly as Bach or Mendelssohn would have done.

It is also not clear what you are perceoiving to be a problem in Ex2. Again, it is difficult to tell from only a picture of the score rather than the score itself (I can't be sure which notes are in which voices, etc), but I don't see any obvious missing beats. It is true that MuseScore lets you delete rests in voices other than 1, and once you have deleted those rests, you can't get those beats except by exchanging voices. I guess maybe you deleted some rests and that is why you had to add notes graphically. If so, simply doing a voice exchange (and then back again) will restore the rests you deleted, and then you can enter notes at those positions normally.

It also isn't clear how Ex2 relates to Ex1 - you seemed to be implying that Ex2 is your attempt to work around some sort of problem you perceived in Ex1, hbut it appears to me to be an entirely unrelated piece of music.

As for the comment about two notes in one place, I cannot tell what you mean.

Perhaps if you simply posted a scan depicting what you are trying to do, we could help show you how to create that. And if you describe how you have attempted to enter it thus far, we could explain why it didn't do whatever it is you expected it to.

Can you show examples of what you are trying to achieve - either scans, photo's or line drawings in .PNG or .JPG format - and I'm betting that someone will be able to achieve it in Musescore and describe to you the steps taken to create it.

It's true that triplets can cause problems but usually when copying and pasting or accidentally creating triplets and then not deleting them before entering new notes but triplets can work quite well alongside "ordinary" notes. Gershwin example attached.

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7C4 Gershwin Do it Again.mscz 9.59 KB

"Incidentally in Ex2 we also see a classic example of MuseScore miscounting the correct number of beats in the bar and short-changing me by a crotchet. It gives rests for a 5/8 bar but I am asking for a 7/8 one."

It is very rare that one staff in a measure be wrong wrt beats but another right. The top staff adds up to 7/8, the bottom one when added left/right also does have 7/8, but the final rest (or the final quarters) are out of place. It looks like things have been manually moved. Please post the score.

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