Creating underscores in lyrics without holding text

• May 26, 2021 - 22:59

Is there a way to create an underscore in the lyrics as if a note was being held, even if there is no "note" before it? This is particularly with regards to repeats and multiple verses. In the screenshot attached, you can see that I'm able to hold the text through into [C] because of the word "rain", but I can't technically add a underscore for the 2nd verse, because its "tied" note is the one at the end of the 1st ending.

I've tried making throwaway text as a verse 2 underneath "rain" and making that invisible, but that makes the underscore on the next line invisible too. I also tried to use text underscores, but there's a clear distinction between each character that makes it different from the smooth underscores normally in lyrics.

Any thoughts on any way I can manipulate this to make it work? Or, any special characters I could add in a text box and move it into the right spot so that it looks correct? Thanks!

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Screenshot (3).png 294.62 KB

Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

That's the solution I have in place at the moment--I tried to emulate the it with underscore characters instead of the line, however there's a distinction between each character, so it doesn't quite look the same as the normal line. (I've attached a screenshot to show what I mean.) So it works, but it looks a bit off. Is there a way to get the same line as the one on top?

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Screenshot (4).png 237.6 KB

There are ways of creating an underscore that vary between operating systems, applications and fonts. On my set up (OS: Ubuntu 21.04, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 3.6.2.548021370, revision: 3224f34) if I type [AltGr] comma I get a long dash. I can type a few and they merge into one another and then I can select them and make them subscript which then looks OK. In another application I can use the Unicode 005F ([Ctrl][Shift] u 005f) but it doesn't work for me in MuseScore.

I suggest opening a new file and trying out various keys to see what might work on your machine.

You could try adding a dummy lyric to the previous line, then covering it up with an opaque white graphic (e.g., using the image capture tool on an empty area of the score).

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Yeah.

If you use Control-Space as dummy lyric (enter Control-Space Underscore Underscore) you get…

Untitled.png

… or, wrapped…

Untitled-1.png

… which means you then “just” have to get rid of the underscore preceding it. A white box image seems to be the way… getting that positioned in a way that doesn’t make things vanish when they relayout could be tricky, and images break saving as .mscx but this at least will end up looking (more) correct.

Handling of things like lyrics, ties, slurs, etc. across repeat barlines and volta houses is… suboptimal, at the moment. In one score I just unrolled the repeat instead. I wonder whether MuseScore 4 is going to contain something helping with this…

In reply to by gmanhoffman

Probably the one from the Lines palette, though it attaches to notes like a crescendo, which I’m not sure is the best option.

Untitled.mscz

I made it orange to demonstrate; select that and change its colour to white, which will do the trick.

I had to make it significantly thicker than the default (both because I didn’t manage to make it entirely straight and to cover the lyrics line fully); other than that, it was just switch placement to below, disable autoplace, move, resize, and raise Z index in Inspector.

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