Need to scoot a chord over

• Mar 31, 2021 - 15:54

Hi everyone,
First, I've read a few forum answers on this, and I'm still having trouble. I'm attaching a screenshot of the issue.

The chord in question is the viio chord (beat 3.5 of the full measure). The RNs are crowded below. I want to create a shaded box around the #vio7 chord for a textbook (obviously creating the graphic in a different program). But to do this, I need to scoot the whole G# diminished chord over a few pixels. Otherwise, my box will overlap into the viio label and/or the viio chord.

When I tried selecting the chord and moving it using the inspector it selected only the noteheads. So I went with that, moved them to the right a bit then selected the stems and moved those to the right a bit. The trouble came with the beam: I could not grow the beam to the right. I told it to grow, but it wouldn't grow. So I was stuck with the second image. Ideally I could just select the whole chord and scoot it over a little, but that was not working at all, so then I tried the piecemeal approach, and was stuck with beams that were too short (see second attached file).

I'm on a Mac, btw.


Comments

In reply to by bobjp

Did you select the RNA before trying to move it in the inspector? A note should only move if it is selected and similarly, to get the RNA text to move, the text (and not a note) needs to be selected. Selection is done with a single click on the RNA, not a double click as that puts you into edit mode to let you modify the text.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

OK, I do see what you mean by just grabbing a note and dragging it with my trackpad! I don't know how I didn't do that before--in my old app notability, I'd always just click on it and then scoot it in increments with the arrows.

What I now don't understand is whether I can ever keep everything else from moving when I scoot one chord. Is there a global setting I can change?

It's easier to help from an actual score, rather than just a picture. But I can suggest here you don't really want to move just the note or even the full chord - you want to move the whole segment, so all the notes and the RNA remain aligned, just pushed over a bit. So use the segment leading space adjustment instead of the chord offset adjustment. In 3.6, this actually happens by default if you click a note and drag right.

But actually, better still would likely be to increase the width of the measure uniformly, either by adding a system break to have fewer measures, or increasing stretch, or other means. Here's we'd definitely need to see the score itself in order to advise better.

But also, you should be able to put a shaded box around the #vio7 chord without any of this. Just use the Inspector to add a frame to it, and set the background color accordingly (probably something semi-transparent, so opacity neither 0 nor 255 but somewhere between. Do that and the space for it is allocated automatically as well.

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