Chord charts/lead sheets ... and ...

• May 11, 2020 - 18:49

To whom it may concern,

I would like to preface this feedback that my intent is to help make a great product more user friendly.

I am a new user of MuseScore and just beginning to grasp how comprehensive it is in its scope.
I also find it quite cumbersome to use as it has (for me) a steep learning curve. I practice by writing lead sheets, (chords above the melody), for musicians to improvise on. Not the easiest task for me particularly when having to make changes. Please see below for that, and a couple of other things.

Currently Musescore, (at least as I experience it), locks the chord to a specific beat in a bar and advances to the next beat by hitting the space bar. While that is labor saving to an extent, to make corrections after the fact is not easy. Why not let the writer switch positions of two chords which were accidentally entered in reverse order. Right now they are attached to their respective beat within the measure and "fight for dear life" to stay that way :) Maybe if you pull it far enough from the origin it will the the software that you want to move the chord and it will break the red chain to let the writer move the chord to a new position and let it attach itself there. I think that clicking and dragging of many of the other features would be a huge, (at least for me), time saving over the menu within menu interface used currently.
For example:
clicking handles and dragging to adjust the measure length, dragging to adjust distance between staves, and between systems. If someone has to engrave precisely to the fraction of a millimeter, he/she can still go deeper into the various menus already available.

Thank you for your consideration,

Abraham


Comments

That's not a bad idea! We already allow dynamics and a few other symbols to change beats by dragging or otherwise moving, no particular reason it couldn't be done for chord symbols or other text. Feel free to submit an official Suggestion for this to the issue tracker (see Support menu above).

Meanwhile, though, it's trivial to just re-type any individual chords you entered erroneously. You can also cut & paste sections of chords, etc.

To adjust measure length, simply use the "{" and "}" commands to decrease/increase stretch. Far faster than needing to click and drag. And you can customize the shortcuts if you prefer, using Edit / Preferences / Shortcuts. That said, it's not impossible a drag mechanism might be added someday, feel free to submit an official Suggestion for that too. Normally, though, adjusting measure widths would be a very rare operation. the default algorithm normally produces very good spacing already.

In reply to by [DELETED] 30037188

This is the feature request forum - a place where we discuss ideas for new features, try to reach some of consensus that a feature is truly missing and desirable and that the way it should should work is well-understood. Then we use the issue tracker to log these more formally (it is the same issue tracker used for bug reports). As I indicated previously, see the Support menu above to find the issue tracker.

In reply to by [DELETED] 30037188

Pretty much the same as anything else - select the chords you want to copy or move, then do the copy or cut, then click the destination, and paste.

To select, use any of the standard ways of selecting in MuseScore - eg, click one, ctrl+click several, or select a range, right-click one and use Select / All Similar Elements in Range Selection, See the lessons on selection and and copy/cut/paste in my course for more info.

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