Formatting of chords (particularly "slash" chords)
I'm trying to transfer my collection of guitar music into MuseScore (melody plus lyrics and chords). But I'm having real trouble getting the chords to display well.
The score/lyrics don't seem to reformat to accommodate the chord annotation, so if I have a bar with multiple chord changes and a long chord name like "Gmaj7/B" the chords tend to overlap. I can manually fiddle with the formatting to fix this, but I'd really rather not have to do this, as the risk is that the formatting won't survive transferring the file to another program for display (for example, MuseScore Songbook on my iPad).
Also, can the formatting of slash chords be adjusted? The default seems to render the bass note lower than the main chord name, so it looks slightly subscripted. I really dislike the way this looks but I've yet to find a way to render the chord all on one line.
Thanks,
Paul
Comments
The chord should automatically space within a measure, but it is true the spacing algorithm currently can't detect and resolve collisions across bar liens. is this what you are seeing? You can resolve then manually by moving the chords, and this should be relatively safe if done thoughtfully/carefully. If it happens a lot for a particular score, you can play with the settings in Style / General / Chord Symbols.
As for rendering of slash chords, this and other rendering is controlled by the chord description file specified in that same dialog. The two pre-defined styles - Standard and Jazz - are designed to mimic some very common publishing practices. But if you have your own style you prefer and are willing to work a but to get it, you can create a custom chord description file by copying one of the defaults and editing it. This process isn't exactly documented, but if you study the existing files, it should be possible to figure things out. Removing the repositioning for the slash and bass note would be a very simple one-line change.
In reply to The chord should… by Marc Sabatella
Yes, it's across bars. It's good to know it's specific to that situation - that should be sufficiently rare that manual fiddling, while not ideal, is enough to fix the odd cases. One thought - which is not something I need to worry about immediately, but which may affect me at some point - if I export the score to MusicXML format (rather than MuseScore's dedicated format) do formatting tweaks like this get preserved?
I had a quick play with the chord description file, and was able to pretty easily change the rendering, which is fantastic - thanks for the pointer.
Thanks for the help.
In reply to Yes, it's across bars. It's… by pf_moore
Formatting depends on the program importing it.
In reply to Yes, it's across bars. It's… by pf_moore
Currently we don't export much manual positioning at all. And one reason is that we know full that different programs will have different defaults, so the manual positioning used in MuseScore will likely look entirely different in another program. There has been some talk about finding ways to preserve more manual formatting for the cases where it makes sense, but I don't know that there has been anything definitive.
In reply to Currently we don't export… by Marc Sabatella
OK, cool. Thanks for clarifying.