Pitches altered in copy/paste process

• Jun 10, 2019 - 00:03

Having written several bars of choice harmony for a big band arrangement, I copied the passage (13 parts, in concert mode) and pasted it (straight across—no change in key, instruments or order) to a later location where it was to be repeated. The results were cacophony! At first I thought I was merely discovering my own terrible mistakes of harmonization, but no, the pasted version actually differs from the copied one. I'll be happy to try to document the phenomenon, but first I'm wondering a) if others have experienced this same thing and b) if I might be making some trivial mistake that causes the weird transformation.


Comments

Perhaps you didn't copy the exact same staves or pasted them onto a different staff than that from which they were taken? I've certainly copied entire sections (if the measure lengths line up) left and right in all sorts of textures. If you post the score and the actions we can see ...

I can think of one way this would happen. If this is a score created before 3.1 and you are working in the parts, there was a bug that led to wrong transpositions when you created parts with the concert pitch button pressed.

It doesn't sound like this is the likely scenario, so attaching the score and explaining how to make your cacophony would allow us to understand better.

In reply to by mike320

Thanks, Mike and BSG. I'm currently using 3.1.0 but I may have begun the score in an earlier version. I'm very confident that I didn't paste to a different staff. It's conceivable that I selected the material to copy from an initial 1/8 note vs the whole measure in which it occurs, but that never seems to make a difference; in any case, the meter and number of measures is accurate between copied and pasted. The typical error has been a note 1/2 or whole tone sharp or flat, but I have not been systematic enough to say there's a regular pattern. Most of the time C/P works fine in all respects, so I'll just have to wait until disaster chooses to strike and then document the heck out of it.

In reply to by elefem

When you get the different paste results, you have done something different. If it's a half step and everything is a 1/2 step off, then you likely accidentally hit an arrow quickly after paste. MuseScore automatically transposes when needed (like copy from a flute to clarinet), but this would sound correct with the wrong instruments rather than a cacophony. I hope we never hear of this again ;-)

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