Change all 1/4 notes to 1/8 + 1/8 rest

• Nov 1, 2017 - 19:46

I need to change every quarter note's in my score into an eight note plus an eight rest.
Is there a quick way to do that or must I do it one by one?


Comments

While this is literally true, it is worth stepping back to ask the bigger question - why are you wanting to change every quarter note into an eighth note plus an eighth rest, and is there perhaps a better way to accomplish the actual goal? A whole series is eighth notes followed by eighth rests is rarely preferable to a whole series of staccato quarter notes, for instance. Or if you then intend to also replace the rests with other notes, better to simply enter the notes directly without first doing this intermediate step. Or if this is the result of a MIDI import, experimenting with the "simplify durations" setting may help. Understanding what you are actually trying to accomplish would help us advise better.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I am transcribing the Super Mario bros. overworld theme. I have found a good transcription on MuseScore's community and started from that one. I have corrected a few notes' pitch, but the author has also used quarter and eighth notes, while in the original tune only eighth notes exist (even in the quarter triplets, notes last exactly as an eighth note - but I am not talking about this case right now). You can clearly see that in this waveform of the very first notes, if you know the tune.
Screenshot_20171102_024827.png
For didactic reasons I want to explicitly show that those are eighth notes, and btw if I read staccato quarter notes on a score I would usually play something different from what I would play if I read eighth notes.

In reply to by ciacnorris

Fair enough. Not familiar with the piece, and I would question the assumption that most people would play these figures differently at any but slow tempos, but indeed, given your situation, one at a time will be the way. Should be easy to get in a rhythm: click first note, 4, right, right, 4, right, right...

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

There are quite a few cases where you want to write 8th notes and 8th rests following each other rather than staccato quarter notes. One case is slow pieces where you want the duration but not the attack that goes with staccato (at least on those instruments capable of such an attack). Another case is the second fiddler in a Gipsy band: He will play long stretches of 8ths off the beat with rests on the beat. I have never seen that written in staccato quarter note syncopes.

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