Expressing Piano Notation
I am transcribing a Gilbert and Sullivan piano + vocals score and have run into a notation that I'm not entirely familiar with (being more of a vocalist than a pianist), and it is not clear how to notate this in MuseScore. For example, in a 4/4 measure, there are half notes, or dotted halves in pairs that are connected with double bar beams. I am assuming that in the actual measure they have durations more like quarter notes. I found online a note that suggested these should be treated as tremolo accented notes, but the duration and the notation still make me think I'm missing something. In any event, I can find no way to duplicate this notation in MuseScore outside of changing the time signatures for those specific measures, but since they may have other, unpaired notes in the measure, changing the signature isn't viable. I've attached a screen grab of a few measures to show you.
Any explanation of what I'm seeing and how I can appropriately notate it in MuseScore would really be appreciated.
Thank you for any help you can provide.
| Attachment | Size |
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| PIano measures.PNG | 93.59 KB |
Comments
Create the notes as quarter notes (or dotted-quarter notes, where applicable), then select each note and set its Head type to Half in the Inspector.
I don't know how to beam them together, as setting the beam properties has no effect. Perhaps someone else can suggest a solution.
Edit: Those “double-bar beams” are tremolo symbols. I don't know how to make them connect to the notes though. And in fact, I don't know if you'd want to connect them to the notes, because then they'd look like beams!
In reply to Create the notes as quarter… by Spire42
Thank you, that's a good suggestion. I think I'm underusing the capabilities of the inspector. Will have to study that more.
I guess I wasn't that far off. For a modern score, maybe I should use the quarter notes with tremolo articulations under the assumption that a modern accompanist may not know an old style of notation.
In reply to Thank you, that's a good… by StreamingTrout
I agree. Unless you're going for a faithful reproduction of the appearance of the original score, there's no point in using the confusing old-style tremolos.
BTW, if you attach tremolo symbols to the notes, you won't even have to tweak the noteheads; MuseScore will do the right thing and automatically render them to look like half notes.
This is an older style of notating a tremolo between notes.
Some work is in progress to enable this style in a future MuseScore version (see #18897: Minim tremolo with beam styling and the linked code change request at https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/5612