Piano score, one note at a time, no rests? Possible?

• Aug 14, 2013 - 00:51

I've been looking around in the help files and archives and hand book, and have not yet been able to verify if it is at all possible to write music on a piano score (both treble and bass)

1) with only one pitch sounding at a time

and

2) without a rest showing in the other staff.

If there is a way to do this, and there is a tutorial for the 'how-to's', I'd be thrilled to be pointed in that direction.

If this is not possible with musescore, does anyone know if there is a program which would support this sort of work?

Thanks!

bomackin


Comments

and hi, and sorry for my language. I am not native speaker. I am not sure if I'm understand you properly, but...
Take a look at the attachment: which measure of those three looks like your goal? Those red marks are not from the MuseScore of course.

Attachment Size
1_att.png 159.64 KB

In reply to by Lally

I enjoyed singing my way through your file.

Can you tell me what you prepared it for? The simplicity of it and the grace of it could be very useful in teaching.

As for my initial question, thanks for trying to help, but at this point, your file didn't really illustrate what I have in mind........, I might try to upload one of my attempts after a while, when I'm more certain what I'm going to do, format-wise (landscape, or not; how long each exercise should be, etc.)

For now, I've gotten enough help from others to get started on my current project.

In the meantime, I'm really impressed with the potential pedagogical applications of your music file. Do you have more like it by chance? I can think of some students who would benefit from that level of work, especially if there was a good bit of it in a collection.

FWIW, just thinkin' about your lovely melody.

Thanks again for trying to help!

You can hide any rest (or any element) with right click on it -> Invisible. It will turn gray, so you can right click on it again if necessary, but it will not be printed, or displayed if you saved as PDF. If you really don't want to see it on the screen, go to display -> Show invisible and uncheck it.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

Wow, i tried out the right-click thing, and it worked very well. It's not the perfect spacing when there is no time siggie, but hiding the rests (and bar lines too for that matter) will go far in sharing my lesson plans with my students! woohoo! Thanks everyone!

You know, I'm sure that the 'right click to hide elements' function is in the support material somewhere and I simply missed it. Thank you ever so much for your patience with us newbies!

(And yes! I'm becoming quite a fan of MuseScore! This is an incredible community and service. There are few communities that help each other like this one does. amblesideonline is a homeschooling community that does, and now there's this. I'm not sure i know of any others off the top of my head. I'm sure others exist, but they are few and far between. This is great! Thanks again!)

(happy dancing while writing music isn't always easy, but right now it is!!!)

BTW, is there a reasn you wantt to do this? Are you aware the normal rules of music notation call for rests to be shown in empty staves?

Is it possible you are talking aout a single line that eindws its way up and down from staff to staff? If so, then you probably wNt to check out Cross staff beaming .

Otherwise, maybe if you described your special / unusual situation better and perhaps posted a picture of what you mean, we could be of more help.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the questions and support. I'll check out the cross staff beaming. It might be useful as I progress through the various exercises which I am preparing for introducing the piano staff to non-readers.

The exercises are not melodies crossing from one staff to another. They are more abstract in construction, but can still be quite lovely to sit back and hear, even if they are not compositions worth recording and employing in serious recitals of any kind.

So you see, the work I am trying to do at this particular moment has more to do with pedagogical purposes than 'pure' or applied music.

The inspiration for this approach is a set of exercises recommended by a woman back in the late 1800's, early 1900's, which used to be written by hand by teachers for any of their students who actually went through such studies.

They would write varied exercises to target the level of the student(s), providing extra work at each level only when/if needed.

Obviously, that was a tedious approach.

Today, I'd like to bring back her studies of the staff, and have them prepared at various sizes, with plenty of new exercises at each level as needed.

The only other 'catch' that I have not worked out to date is that the teacher who initially recommended these exercises also recommended that the notes be indicated by x's on stems (more like some drum notations), in order to try to convey to the students that the idea of keeping a beat was not the important point during these exercises.

Does anyone know how to replace noteheads with 'x's in piano scores???

.........

After the initial introduction to the staff is worked through well, then it would be time to work on reading melodies in five-finger positions along with simple accompaniments (swapping out hands at times), then move to anticipating how to finger the next passage, first by very recognizable 'expansions', 'contractions', and 'shifts' - one step at a time.

The whole point is to train the less visual/spatial piano students to take in the keyboard as effectively as the highly visual/spatial students - at least, with my background, that's how I would sum it up these days.

If you happen to know of such work already having been done, I'd love to know about it before I keep forging my way through the process using MuseScore. I'm having a blast with MuseScore. It's really freeing me up in a lot of ways. however, there is no need to duplicate what already exists! KWIM?

Thanks again for asking.

Lorraine

In reply to by RainahN-Songs

One note at a time, no rests - if this is what you mean (see attachment).
1) only one pitch sounding at a time
AND
2) without a rest showing in the other staff.

If you open the file in Musescore you can click on the menu item 'Display', then click on 'show invisible', to toggle the invisible items on/off to see how it's done. Please note that the example is just that - an example, not meant to be musical.

Basically, if you create a time signature with lots of beats, you won't have to hide bar lines.
For the most part, notes line up fairly well. If they don't you can double click the note head (to enter edit mode) and nudge it with the left / right arrows. The stem will follow when you click elsewhere.

You can change a notehead to an 'x' by right clicking on the notehead, then in the popup menu click on 'note properties', then click on 'cross' in the drop down list next to 'Note Head Group'.
To apply an 'x' to all the noteheads, right click on one then under 'Select' in the popup menu you can choose 'All Similar Elements' to highlight all the noteheads before you change them.

Welcome aboard...

Attachment Size
Avant-garde Piano.mscz 1.77 KB

In reply to by RainahN-Songs

It would be interesting to see an example of what you mean - do you a scanned PDF or anything you could post?

You can change noteheads via the Note Heads palette or by right clicking a note and choose Note Properties. Lots of options to play with, but the "x" second from the left in the top row on the palette is probably what you want (even though looks funny in the palette because it is showing the hollow version used for half notes and whole notes). Click a note or select a region (or the whole score), double click the "x", done.

I've begun setting a series of children's poems to music, which is a blast! I'll get back to this project when the poem project is completed......, then I'll post an example of what I'm trying to do and see if I've learned enough to have finessed all the tricks I'll need for the pedagogical project which started me on this series of inquiries.

Thanks for everything, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can wrangle with everything on my clutterful desk!!!

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