Moving/repositioning notes and stems at the same time

• Apr 21, 2020 - 00:35

I'm looking for a way in musescore 3.4.2 to move notes and stems in the inspector. Right now these elements have to be done separately. In the "Element Group I can only select Notes, Grace notes or Rests. (See first attachment) If I select notes I can move the note head, but not their stems. At the bottom on that group there is an option for stems, but then only the stems move. (See second attachment) While this is would be great for custom editing, for everyday editing it takes up way too much time.

Either I'm doing it wrong, or the option to join these when repositioning does not exist.

Thanks, Scott

Attachment Size
When a group of notes is selected.png 32.69 KB

Comments

In reply to by scottaugust

Normally moving notes/chords should be necessary only rarely. I could imagine, depending on the nature of your work, this coming up somewhat more often for educational handouts than in normal music. But even so, it's pretty likely that whatever it is you are trying to do do, there is an even easier way to do it than messing with these sorts of manual adjustments. If you attach an example score and describe what you are trying to do and why, there's a good chance we can show you better ways of doing it.

BTW, the reason that section of the Inspector is labeled "chord" is that it contains the settings that would apply to the entire chord if there were more notes. The "note" section is for just that one notehead within the chord. When you look at it that way, the distinction starts to make sense.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc,

Great to hear from you! I have your Mastering MuseScore book sitting here right next to me.

Yes, this is mostly for when I’m making handouts for students. For example if I make a time signature invisible, then all the notes go crashing to the left and look weird. What Shoichi posted works well enough but I have attached a score in case you can point me to another way.

In reply to by scottaugust

I don't see an attachment, but I know exactly the case you are talking about, as I encounter that often enough too.

One problem with moving the note is that it then gets too close to the next note, and you may need to adjust it also,. Another is that it messes up the alignment between staves - you need to make the same adjustment on other staves. You could solve both these problems by instead increasing the "leading space" in the "segment" section ("segment" being MuseScore-speak for, everything at that point in time across all staves).

However, it's a bug really that hiding the time signature creates this problem - see #293775: Time and key signature spacing incorrect when invisible. The bug only happens if there is no key signature also, but of course that's common in these cases. So we definitely want to fix the bug, we just haven't gotten around to it. And one big drawback with doing a manual adjustment of either kind - to offset or to leading space - is that when the bug gets fixed, your manual adjustment will now be inappropriate. So better to find other ways.

In this case, the best workaround I know is to add an explicit "open/atonal" key signature (shows in the palette with an "X", but is invisible for real). This works around the bug - even though it doesn't display, it's actually treated as being present in the score internally in a way a plain C major key signature is not.

Actually, that approach arguably creates too much room, at least if this were "normal" music. But for the purpose of worksheets it's often just as well. So I'm more reluctant to 'fix" that :-)

Anyhow, good example of a case where adjusting offset is one way to solve a problem but there are definitely better ways!

In reply to by scottaugust

Got it this time. But yeah, you're right, if you do have a key signature, the bug also appears. I guess I had only considered the "no key signature at all" (C major) case.

Anyhow, the first workaround I suggested still works better - instead of changing note offsets individually, just change the leading space for the first note.

Note you don't need any other time signatures. Instead of adding a new signature for every measure with a different number of beats, simply insert or remove beats or join & split measures using the various commands for this, or use Measure Properties to change the "Actual duration" of the measures. There shouldn't need to be more than one time signature for the entire score no matter how many shenanigans you want to play with measure duration.

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