Grace notes

• Apr 19, 2020 - 02:59

How to have a grace note showing on a bass clef when the object notes follow a clef change


Comments

I'm not sure I understand your question. Why would adding grace notes be any different if you apply a clef change?

What is happening that is not what you'd expect when you try to notate this?

In reply to by jeetee

Thank you and sorry my query was lacking in detail. In Musescore 3.4 I am transcribing a portion of the piano reduction of Rhapsody in Blue. There is a point where the right-hand part has been assigned a bass clef. It changes to the normal treble clef but the grace note(s - an octave) are still in the bass clef . I need to place the clef between the grace notes and their object chord as there is a large jump.

In reply to by Shoichi

Thank you. I'm familiar with cross-staff notation which is used elsewhere in the piece. But this all takes place on the one staff - I just need to be able to put a clef symbol between the grace note and its object chord on the same staff. Cross-staff notation didn't work (I had already tried that).

In reply to by jeetee

Moving placements of either the grace notes or the clef didn't work as they both moved proportionately no matter what I did. (Unfortunately I don't know how to show an image of the relevant notes, and can't find anything about non-playing grace notes)

In reply to by dominikwrona3

Thank you. I took a screen capture (on computer) edited it to show the relevant section of the music and tried adding the file to the "choose a file" section. I tried PNG and BMP formats as well as PDF but none were accepted. The need has now gone but I'm curious about what I might have been doing wrong for any future problem. The present exercise is the first time I've used the forum and I appreciate the way people have taken their time to help.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thank you for this. For some reason I wasn't successful but the problem has now been resolved. If I strike it again in the future I will follow it through to resolve what I was doing wrong. For now, I will leave it but at least I now know what I tried was possible.

In reply to by bryang

Then you've not played enough with placements ;-)
The trick is to use a negative leading segment space here to compensate for the offset of a grace chord, as well as the leading segment space of the clef.

So the idea is to add space in front of the clef to place the grace notes; move the grace notes to the left to create space between them and the main note (so the clef will fit in that space); then add negative space to the main note segment to make it overlap with the clef, lining up their provided gaps for each other.

Then you can use the 'fix to line' option to make those grace notes look at the correct position for the previous clef, whilst maintaining their current pitch. The only downside here is that if an accidental should be applied to the grace note; using "fix to line" looses that accidental visually.
The way to get those back is to apply them either as a symbol (fixed size) or as a special character of staff text (what I chose in the example), allowing to set their size to match the smaller grace note size.

See the attached example.
It is a bit of fiddle work to get the hang of it and having to manually add the accidentals as text is no joy; but it has the upside that the musical notation did not change at all. So exporting to any other format will maintain the music "as is".

Attachment Size
304001_grace_before_clef.mscz 9.38 KB

In reply to by jeetee

Thank you so much for the trouble you've taken to help me. The suggestions I've had have made me aware of placements and off-set settings which in turn led me to explore and experiment. With the result I've managed to solve a range of relatively minor problems in dealing with a relatively complex score - it's been a good learning experience and I wouldn't have got there without the help from you and others - it's been invaluable. Thank you again - all problems resolved.

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