Want a Specific 2-Line Staff
I've been tasked with creating new pew missals for my church. In our current missal, some of our monotone-esque music is written on a two-line staff (B and G line.)
However, if I ask musescore to reduce the vocal staff to two lines, it gives me the G and D line, leaving a gap where the B line would normally be, (and a floating B-flat in the key-signature.) Can I force it to give me the G and B instead?
Here is a screenshot of what I WANT. (I had to create this using an image-editing program. Clearly not an ideal solution for a missal full of music!)
What it gives me by default, instead:
The problem becomes more pronounced as other pieces of music have more notes between the B and E lines. We end up with notes sort of "floating" in the ether.
Comments
with 1.3. You can try a nightly, where you can set the distance of the lines (see attachment).
If you are writing plainchant, which plainly this is. Why do you need a key signature at all??
Conventionally plainchant is written without a key signature and with the C clef defining one line as middle C and thus the mode.
In your example none of the notes you are using hit the B line at all, so a key signature is irrelevant.
You can move most MuseScore elements by double clicking them and using arrow keys to move them or by simply dragging them with the mouse.
I'm not sure whether this applies to time signatures and key signatures however.
HTH
Michael
In reply to If you are writing by ChurchOrganist
ChurchOrganist -
Good points all around. My music theory is super-rusty, and limited to 10 years of piano lessons that ended about 15 years ago. The term "plainchant" is new to me, but it makes perfect sense.
I find that I'm NOT able to move drag the time or key signatures as you suggested, but your point is well taken: that I can simply ditch them.
Unfortunately, I think the crux of the problem remains: I need two ADJACENT staff-lines, and that doesn't seem possible immediately out of the box. I think I will try the previous respondent's suggestion of squishing the lines together using the nightly build. Of course, with that approach, I lose the ability of having musescore play it back for me ... but if it gets the job done, then I'll go with it.
Also, now that I know the term "plainchant," I can search the site for the proper terminology.
Thanks!
In reply to ChurchOrganist - Good points by JonathanLane
I have been transcribing plainchant with MuseScore for well over a year now.
I thoroughly recommend using the MuseScore 2 Unstable builds available as NIghtly BUilds for this purpose.
The MuseScore 2 Unstable releases have a number of features very beneficial to the sort of work we are doing - a split and join measure facility for example and the ability to supress the display of time signatures.
Also the ability use custome staffs is greatly improved.
Unfortunately most of the work I have done is not uploadable to musescore.com as it does not yet allow the upload of MuseScore 2 scores.
BUt you can see some of the stuff I've done here: http://musescore.com/user/9641/sets/63712
All is Creative Commons licenced so feel free to share, but please ask first if you wish to make a recording of a performance as this is not covered by the Creative Commons Licence - basically if you're planning to make money out of it then I want my cut :)
If you need further help with this somewhat specialist area of liturgical music don't hesitate to ask :)
HTH
Michael
In reply to I have been transcribing by ChurchOrganist
Forgive the late reply, but I am just getting started and trying to do exactly this. After adjusting the staff to two lines, I was able to get the correct key signature, but the notes are one line too high for any staff with less than 4 lines:
The notes were entered B, C, B, B, B. Is there a way to fix this?