Tenor voice plays octave too low

• Aug 14, 2020 - 22:19

I imported 2 xml files into MuseScore. Both are for SATB with 4 separate staves. In playback, the tenor part is playing an octave lower than it should. What can I do to fix this? Thanks!


Comments

Best way is to attache the score. Did you check the correct clef for the tenor staff? Maybe add it from the clef palette. Or select all notes of this staff and use the shortcut ctrl+arrow up.

In reply to by Trochi

Yes, the first tenor staff is set to transpose down a an octave (see Staff/Part Properties), and it's notated with treble-8 clef. So indeed you see things two octaves lower. Seems something got a little lost in the translation with the MusicXML. Transposition info is often a little off on export/import. Simply enough to fix, just disable the transposition in the staff/part properties, then if you want the part to actually sound an octave higher than currently, select it and hit Ctrl+Up.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thank you for your answer! Unfortunately the 8va bassa is not the issue here as I can demonstrate in this (https://youtu.be/8MFuXaWqumY) video. The original Tenor system plays two octaves lower than the original treble clef while the other one I created after the fact plays one octave below (as it should). Both written with 8va bassa clefs.
However this only appears to be an issue when importing a musicxml file from sibelius and is not a more general bug as I thought originally, as this behaviour was not repeatable when I created a choir piece with the musescore preset from scratch.
Any idea what might cause this? Couldn't find anything in the instrument settings thus far.

In reply to by mirabilos

According to my experience, Sibelius has never been able to playback 8-clefs in the correct octave, being the one indicated by the clef. As a consequence it needs to fake it and pretend there was a transposition, which then gets exported in the xml file.

I'm new to Musescore, but I finally found an easy quick fix for this! Highlight the entire tenor part using shift, go to the instruments tab, click the gear on the right for the tenor, click "replace instrument", and just replace it with tenor. Then you can simply use the up key to nudge the whole thing up an octave and it's done! There may be a few accidentals that need to be respelled, but that seems to be easily done with the up and down keys.

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