Transposed parts from one lead sheet
I'm sure there's a totally easy way to do this, but I can't figure it out and I wasn't able to find anything in the forums.
I have a Musescore document containing a single instrument which represents a lead sheet. I want to print out various transpositions, and obviously I'd like to avoid having to copy the same music into separate instruments because I don't want multiple copies of the same music floating around.
My thought was to use the score as the concert pitch lead sheet, and add a part for B-flat instruments, a part for E-flat instruments, and a part for bass-clef instruments, and then put the sole instrument into all three parts, with the appropriate clefs and transpositions for each. However, I can't seem to figure out how to add the same instrument to more than one part, and I also can't manage to change the transposition within one part without also affecting the transposition of the score.
Halp!
Comments
There's no straightforward way to do what you want. The key of an instrument is what it is. If you create a score and want it transposed to several keys, one way to do what you want is to create parts (or a part) and export the part to an mscz file, open the file, transpose that and save it. If you make a change to the score repeat the process. There is no automated way to update score like this.
Another way is to create all of the instruments and hide all but the C instrument (remove the check from visible in the instruments dialog) after you copy it from the C part to the others. You will need to make the parts visible, recopy and paste and make them invisible again when you update it. You can then make all the parts you need and only the main score will be visible.
Hi! Unfortunately, I don't think there is a great solution to this. It's easy enough to make multiple parts including the same instrument - just use the New button in File / Parts to generate a single part and assing it the instrument(s) you want. But it won't work to have different transpositions in the score and part. Concert pitch on vs off, yes, but different transpositions, no. MuseScore will let you try, but bad things will happen.
One thing I've seen people do is have all transpositions in the score as separate instruments, then just copy/paste material from one staff to the others. it's clever and should work, but for my purposes, it's always been fine to simply maintain the copies separately. Someday I may experiment with this more though.
Well, that's disappointing to be sure! My current best way to do this (which I think I prefer over the suggestions given; thanks anyway though) is to load the concert-pitch document into the application, transpose it, export a PDF, and then undo the transpose (or close without saving). This has the advantage that I'm guaranteed that there are no transposed documents to get out of sync with the original, but has the disadvantage that the PDFs won't be labelled as transposed. Another disadvantage is that in situations where transposing requires extra work (e.g. enharmonic re-spellings that have to be done by hand; music spacing issues; etc), such work will have to be repeated every time I create a new PDF. But yeah, as of now I think I prefer to do it this way in spite of those issues.