Chords do not change in "Concert Pitch"

• Apr 22, 2013 - 21:13
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project
  • Select an instrument in key different than C (e.g. Tenor saxophone in Bb) and create some chord charts in that staff.
  • Click on "Concert Pitch"
    => notes in Tenor sax. staff are displayed correctly (major second lower) but not the chords (these are not changed)

    This works correctly in current release (MuseScore 1.3) but not in nightly builds.


  • Comments

    Toggling concert pitch means enabling and disabling the transpositions that are recorded in the staff properties - the ordinary transpositions that are normally performed for various instruments. For example, music for clarinets is normally written a makor second higer than it is i tended to sound, because clarinets sound a major second lower than written. With concenrt pitch n, the clarinet parts its notes, chords, and key signatures as they actually sound. With concert pitch off, everything int the clarinet part is transposed up a makor second - nites, chirds, and key signatures - which is how the music needs to be written for clarinet in order to *sound* the way it appears with concert pitch off.

    And this has no bearing to the chord names attached to it, someone playing a guitar or piano along with such a transposing instrument would play the very same chords, regardless whether concert pitch is on or off.

    If such a transposing instrument would play chords (clarinets don't, does any other?), they'd still sound the same, irrespectiv of concert pitch, hence have the same name.

    Chord symbols are not placed on a clarinet part for the benefit of a guitarist - the guitarist would have his own part, not transposed (unless it is a capoed part, I guess). When chords are placed on a clarinet part, they are are placed there for the benefit of the clarinetist, so he knows what notes are available to him should he choose to harmonize or improvise as opposed to playing the written melody. Not to "play" the chords, but to use that information to enable him to figure out notes will sound good should he choose to. So the chords *need* to be transposed accordingly. If the song is in C, and the first chord is C, the chord symbol for the clarinet player must read "D". That way, if the clarinet player imrpvosises a melody based on a "D" chord - like his "D- E-F#-A", it will come out sounding as "C-D-E-G" and thus sound good over the C chord that is actually sounding at that moment. If a clarinet player tried playing lines based on a C chord - if he tried playing his "C-D-E-G" - it would come out sounding like "Bb-C-D-F" and thus sound wrong over the C chord.

    Trust me, this is really how it works. When chords appear on the parts of transposing instruments, they are transposed as appropriate for that instrument, because they are there for the benefit of the player actually playing that part, not some other person playing some other part.

    well, none of my 200+ scores has a guitar staff and almost none has piano staff, but alnost all have chords for the guitar- and piano player, quite a few have a flute and a clarinette staff in addition to SATB. I always attach the chords to the top staff. Fortunatly this usualy is flute or soprano, both non-transposing...

    Most published ensemble music includes separate parts for each instrument; they don't all read from the score. That's the whole reason MuseScore provides a part extraction facility, and why linked parts for 2.0 is such a hugely significant improvement. And when generating separate parts for each instrument, it is crystalclear that the chords attached to the clarinet part are for the clarinettist and the chords attached to the guitar or piano part are for the guitarist or pianist. This is the way the vast majority of ensemble music is produced and published.

    Now it is true that in choral music as well as well as music for a single instrumental soloist with piano accompaniment, it is common for there to be no separate piano part - the pianist reads off the score. But in that case, any chord symbols are still attached to the piano staves, not any wind instrument staves. For instrumental music, there are virtually always piano staves for accompaniment. For choral music, it isn't quite so unusual to have chord symbols only for accompaniment, but in that case, the chord symbols are attached directly to the choral staves, because that is what the guitarist or pianist would normally be looking at to help guide him in creating his accompaniment.

    The case of a score that has choral staves and also staves for transposing wind instuments and also chords for piano/guitar but no actual staves for piano/guitar is very much the exception in the world of published sheet music arrangements. But even in these cases, one would expect the chords to be attached to the choral parts and *not* to the wind instrument part. That's true even if the wond part is for a concert key instrument like flute, but it becomes doubly important in the case of transposing instruments, for precisely the reason we are discussing here - it would be enormously confusing and counterintuitve. Guitarists or pianists will be looking first for their own staves, or if they don't see them, they will be looking at the vocal staves - they will not be looking at the clarinet part. And if the chords are attached to the clarinet part, it will likely lead to disaster as the pianist tries to incorporate those notes into his accompaniment but finds they are in the wrong key.

    So I'd say the situation you are describing basically does not exist in the world of published sheet music, and for good reason. But if for some reason you wanted to create something non-standard like this - and were prepared to explain to the accompanists what was going on - I'd still say that *conceptually* you have separate parts for the clarinet and guitar/piano. It's just that your guitar/piano part happens to use an invisible staff that takes no room in the score. I don't know how well MuseScore might support that, but it seems a reasonable feature to want. I guess an invisible staff with chord symbols placed directly on the staff would do the job. Another workaround would be to deliberately enter your chords a step below where you want them so they will display correctly in the (transposed) score. Another would be to not use the instrument transposition / concert pitch mechanism at all, but to instead instead transpose the clarinet part manually.

    But this is, again, definitely the unusual non-standard exception, not how music is normally written. In the usual case, chords above a staff are for the instrument playing that staff, period.