Changing Style/Layout? (from Lead Sheet to Jazz Lead Sheet)

• Feb 22, 2013 - 12:46

Hi. After reading Marc Sabatella excellent tutorial on Lead Sheet creation I realized that the "Jazz Lead Sheet.mscz" model gets me closer to my ideal lead sheet than the "Lead Sheet.mscx" model I have been using previously. Therefore I am trying to edit a bunch of old lead sheet to "convert" them to the Jazz model, but no luck. I searched the forums, RTFM and even tried copying&pasting onto a new lead sheet: so far it's less time-consuming to redo the lead sheets from scratch.

Am I missing something?
Thanks!
Ivan
(I am using Musescore 1.2 rev.5470 on Windows 7)


Comments

Converting is possible, but not completely straightforward.

You can try Style / Load Style, browse to the Styles folder if necessary, and choose the Jazz Lead Sheet style. This will set some things up for you. But you won't see changes in any existing text until you do two things:

1) Save and reload.
2) Change the overall size of the music (Layout / Page Settings / Space). The plain lead sheet template uses very small print; Jazz Lead Sheet uses 2.0mm, which is sloghtly larger than average but matches the Real Book and other popular fakebooks pretty well.

When you do these two things, much of your text will automatically convert to MuseJazz. You'll still need to redo a few elements like titles. And as the tutorial shows, you need to manually do codas and segnos anyhow. But it's a start, andbetter than nothing.

Copy/paste of contents into a new lead sheet should work pretty well too; certainly I'd expect it to be faster than startng from scratch. You'd just have to reenter all text and other markings aside from chord symbols and lyrics. Smetimes this method is faster than the method I describe above. But either should beat starting from scratch by a mile.

Starting with 2.0, it will be easier to change the style of an existing piece - but, I think, only if the piece was originally created in 2.0.

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