Add properties to MuseScore that govern the visibility of full measure rests

• Jan 29, 2021 - 20:00

Presently we cannot hide full measure rests without manually selecting them and hiding them with a v keystroke

I'm requesting Measure, Staff/Part, and Score>Style properties to toggle visibility of full measure rests.

Using v to toggle visibility is usually relatively simple, but whenever I add new measures I have to select the rests and hide, whereas a Score or Staff/Part property would hide them even in newly added measures. Thus less need to clear them out or constantly look over my shoulder when preparing to publish.

Thanks for considering!

Scorster

scorster


Comments

Can you explain the real world use case for this? Measure with no rests is not standard notation, so it's not the sort of thing we'd normally provide a dedicated command / setting to produce. But if it's something you can show is actually commonly used by a number of publishers, then it's certainly something we can consider.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

>> Measure with no rests is not standard notation

Agreed. Hidden rests are not part of normal notation. And thanks for your interest.

I've requested this feature primarily for educational purposes.

I often create scores containing multiple pieces and want to leave blank staves after each piece so—on hardcopy—teachers can easily add notational comments or indicate variations for a student using the printed page.

I also want blank lines (i.e. hidden full measure rests) in my music worksheets (e.g. Key Signature quizzes) so students can answer questions on the provided blank staves, and so they have an area where they can hand write compositional responses to assignments.

Thus it would also be great if there was an option to also hide barlines over a range of measures.

Again, for educational purposes, there's yet another reason for "restless" measures.

When I created a transcription of a fiddle tune I find lots of variations with which fiddlers make their personalized mark. Sometimes I've transcribe verbatim, but then students don't have anything specific to memorize. So I usually write out a basic version of the tune—a composite of either the most repeated ideas or my favorite variation. Then I write dozens of variations below the piece, as shown, where the variation is positioned so the reader can find it straight down, or look to a similar location on the following page.

I prefer to write these variations on lines with omitted full measures restsfor reasons stated above, but also because students think the "restful" measures are part of the variation, or worse, that all the variations are to be played in sequence. When I omit rests, students more readily see that the fully blank measures are just places where there are no variations.

Fiddle tune variations with hidden Full rests.png

I can see MuseScore becoming immensely popular in the educational/academic/workbook field once it offers features like hidden "full measure rests," "hidden barlines" and multi-column text wrap.

Thanks!

scorster

In reply to by scorster

The thing is, it already does support these things, quite easily. It's a special case usage so it require a few extra seconds, but considering the hours of work that go into creating these, that seems like it should be inconsequential. The thing is, each educator has their own individual way of creating worksheets, and it can't reasonably be expected there will be a single command for each educator that formats things exactly the way he/she wants. Better to provide a powerful set of tools that can be used by anyone to get any result, rather than a smaller set of tools that box you into one person's idea of what a worksheet should look like.

It currently only takes a few steps to achieve this for the entire score: [Right-click >Select >More > Same Duration, OK, v.]
Replacing this with Format >Style >Score >Toggle visibility of whole measure rests, OK] would only reduce the process by one step.

In reply to by underquark

Excellent point! And a great option when I want the scope to apply to the entire score. And in my case, that's most of the time.

However I can foresee instances where the "score" portion of my document may actually need full measure rests. And in such a case I could override a Measure Show/Hide option (applied to a measure or range of measures) would allow me to override the global hiding of measure rests.

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