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• Dec 28, 2018 - 16:56

For a multi-voice score, can I playback a single voice, or several but not all of the voices?


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In reply to by mike320

I hope I'm using the correct terms here- pardon my ignorance. I have a staff with three voices. I would like to assign each voice a different instrument sound for playback, and I gather this is done via the Mixer. When I open Mixer in MuseScore 3, I see the name entry at the top with the color rectangle, the Patch drop-down below that; the bottom half shows a single vertical column with Mute and Solo buttons and Volume slider. So:
- how do I get three vertical entries in the bottom half (one for each voice)?
- how do I assign a different patch to each voice?
I have the Name/Patch combo "Piano"/"Grand Piano" and can create a new combo "Harp"/"Harp," but I would then expect the Name field to become a dropdown with two entries (Piano and Harp), but this does not happen. I also don't understand what effect changing the color rectangle is supposed to have.

If there exists documentation for this just point me to it- I do not want to waste your time.

In reply to by [DELETED] 30677597

That is possible but not an intended purpose of voices and the mixer. To do this, it takes a little bit of trickery.

Create an instrument with 3 channels like the violin. It give you a sound for Violin, Violin-Pizzicato and Violin-Tremolo. If you can't see these channels, click the arrow at the top left of the box for the instrument. You can then select each channel one by one and change the sound of the channel to any instrument you like. Do this for each of the three chanels, but keep in mind you cannot have instruments with different transpositions display and play properly on the same staff like this. So you can have a Flute, Oboe and C trumpet on the same staff, but you can't make one of these a piccolo (because it transposes 1 octave), a Bb clarinet, English horn and so on. To be clear, these transposing instruments display the notes on the wrong staff lines. Keeping this in mind, once you have assigned the sounds to the channels, insert any text you like, meaningful text is better, but you can make meaningless text invisible if you like. Right click the text you entered and choose "Staff Text Properties..." There are 4 buttons to show which voice you are selecting for a sound. Click the 1 and in the dropdown select "Normal", on the next line click 2 and assign "pizzicato" to it, on the third line click 3 and assign "tremolo" to it. The instrument you assigned to violin will sound for all voice 1 notes, the instrument sound you assigned to violin-pizzicato will be in all voice 2 notes and voice 3 will have the instrument you assigned to violin-tremolo.

This sounds much more complicated than it sounds, but is quite easy once to understand it. You will very likely end up with red or gold notes because the violin does not have the same range, I would suggest that you open Edit(MuseScore on Mac)->Preferences and under the Notes tab uncheck "Color notes outside of usable pitch range" if you run into this problem and don't like it. There are other ways to fix colored notes, but this is the easiest.

Feel free to ask further questions if I didn't make something clear.

In reply to by [DELETED] 30677597

Depends on your reason for notating it this way, I guess. Do you actually expect one person to be playing all three instruments at once, using one hand on one instrument for the notes in voice 1, a different hand on a different instrument for the notes in voice 2, and perhaps a foot for the notes in voice 3? If so, your approach makes sense. Otherwise, probably not, but feel free to explain in more detail...

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Nope, this is not a circus act, I'm just a novice at this. I'm trying to set down a piece for three instruments (and three players), but I'd like to be able to play back the three voices (?) simultaneously. When I notate the three parts on separate staves, then playback goes through the staves sequentially rather than simultaneously.

In reply to by [DELETED] 30677597

Just use 3 instruments then (here: add 2 more)

If you want 3 instruments with different sounds on a single staff you'd need to resort to tricks:
Use a violine, use staff text and it's properties to assign voices to 'normal', pizzicate and tremolo, and in Mixer change the sound for those

In MuseScore 3.0 you can mute voices

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