How to write psalms with "alla breve" signature and without measure bars

• Mar 7, 2019 - 11:11

Hi,

since I am busy doing stuff related with the psalms, I have some trouble (see title).

Psalms often deviate from more standard music. The standard flow of measures often doesn't work out so well.

In many church books you'll find the melody notation with an alla breve signature and without measure bars.

Is such a thing possible in MuseScore?

Many thanks in advance!

/Arie

Comments

• Mar 7, 2019 - 16:09

Don't give up.

mensurstrichs is independent from the "experimental" feature of changing barlines to allow longer notes in a measure. I've never seen any problems with using this. You can right click the staff, and remove the check from "Show barlines" and check the "Experimental" item in Format->Styles... and you can enter the notes the way you like for chants. This has been considered "Experimental" for years and I've never seen a bug report saying it doesn't work.

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• Mar 7, 2019 - 22:30

Aside from that though, it's also perfectly possible to use the "join selected measures" command to create music with no (or as few as you want) barlines. If you're having difficulty understanding how, feel free to attach your score as it is and people will be happy to help!

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• Mar 8, 2019 - 09:09

Hi guys,

because Mike told me not to give up, again I exhaustively tried it in the so called experimental way, but to no avail:
1. tried it on an existing piece
2. tried it on fresh piece
3. tried it with and without selecting bars
Am I missing some small extra thing to be done??????

But hurray, I got it to work in the way Marc proposed.

Since I am a Dutchie I normally use MuseScore with the Dutch language. Most often it is really impossible to use a simple translation, because clashing terminology.

This is what I did (as exact as possible):
0. select the domain of measures for which bars should disappear
1. either (choose in the menu "Add | Measures | Append Measures") or (press Alt+Shift+b)
2. type a (too high) number of measures, e.g. 1000
3. press "OK"

After that, the score appears in this way:
1. all notes from the original domain of measures now appear in one big measure without bars
3. a lot of empty measures, being the leftovers of the process

So, many thanks to all and in this case especially to Marc!

Best wishes,
/Arie

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• Mar 8, 2019 - 10:24

Aaaaaaargh, must have an infecting bad brainfart somehow. Being sure I had found how to do it, I went throught my recipe again and oops: not working! In fact I realized that "Append measures" is something totally different. Switching languages all the time isn't too good for knowing to find your way in MuseScore.

So, I started all over, searching the internet and found something in the MuseScore English manual.

Here https://musescore.org/en/handbook/measure-operations I found under the heading "Split and join" the sub heading "Join measures" where I read:
1. Select the measures you want to join
2. From the menu bar, select Edit | Measure | Join Selected Measures

So, I selected a set of measures and pressed menu "Edit" only to find out that the option "Measure" in the "Edit" menu is totally missing. See attached picture.

@Marc, tell me how you do this. Could it be related to the MuseScore version? Currently I use version 3.0.4.5763 revision cda4080.

BTW, I found another innovative way to reach the same goal (this time always working) albeit for the whole score only:
1. menu "Format | Style | Barlines"
2. change "Thin barline thickness" to 0sp (zero = invisible ;-)

Thx
/Arie

Attachment Size
musescore-issue.png 26.08 KB

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• Mar 9, 2019 - 09:21

Hi kuwitt,

indeed!

What I did was an "open" search on the internet, which obviously (mis)led me to an (obviously) older version of the MuseScore manual.

After using MuseScore quite a long time and quite intensively it keeps amazing me because of it's sheer possibilities.

An anekdote:
Being an amateur, I once could help out a (in my country) very well known professional musician, which I happen to know fairly well. He was using some product x (which had cost him a lot of money) and he couldn't figure out how to get something done with it. Using MuseScore that task was accomplished in under a minute. He was amazed.
To be fair: maybe he had the same probelem as I had with this current "issue", not knowing his way in the product and possibly being misled somehow in any way.

I love MuseScore! Many thanks to it's developers!

And also many thanks for now to kuwitt and all the other very friendly people reacting to my questions for help!! It is a really nice and friendly community!

Best wishes,
/Arie

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• Feb 9, 2022 - 19:36

So I found a workaround to just make it look like a clean psalm sheet music.
you extend one bar to one whole line by pressing enter. Then you create your custom time signature where you enter the numerical value of your notes in the psalm (Eg. One breve, three semibreves is 8+4+4+4 = 20, your time signature is 20/4)
Then in the Text: section of the "Create new time signature" dialogue box, type nothing. So you'll be able to apply that time signature to the bar and it won't be visible. Looks something like the attached image.

Attachment Size
Screenshot 2022-02-10 010438.png 55.31 KB

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