Any way to make nested repeats?

• Aug 4, 2022 - 23:49

My song structure is AABAAB. So, I want to write it like [[A2]B2] But if I write A]B], whew } is end-repeat barline, it plays AABAB - the second repeat for A is ignored. Adding 2 start-repeat barlines to the 1st measure is not possible, adding one doesn't help. Any solution?

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railway.mscz 9.54 KB

Comments

Real musicians will choke on nested repeats also - they won't understand where to go back to, and you'll have a train wreck as one third of the musicians go to one place, another third go someone else, and another third give up in confusion. Simply write out the AAB and put repeats around it - that is by far the easiest for musicians to read. If doing that would cause it take more pages than is convenient, consider the DC method, but realize that's much more confusing to people.

In reply to by etsenberg

OK, I realize that this thread is already several days old, but I feel compelled to make comment on it, in my usual snarky manor.

First off, I agree with Marc concering nested repeats--they just get too confusing: "Play through twice, then on the second time go on to B, then back to beginning, then at C skip to . . ." Yikes! ( Marc's term was "trainwreck"--ironic, given that the OP's file was named "railway.") Just write the whole thing out! What are we, medieval monks spending hours copying with expensive ink on expensive parchment? It's CTRL-C and CTRL-V all the way, baby!

Second, the OP says nobody will ever read or play his music from print, but he also says that it is a song with lyrics, so unless he's managed to coax the Mighty Musescore Chorale to sing something besides "Oohs" and "Aahs", someone sometime will have to read it from score. Hopefully, more than one someones!

The OP also said that the lyric structure would make the musical structure apparent: ironically, in medieval music, there were many song forms--"formes fixes"--which used complex patterns of repetition (AB aAab AB, etc.): the composer or scribe would only write out the two strains of music--"A" and "B"-- and the text, and it was up to the singer to fit it all together.

In reply to by wfazekas1

If I need to explain the obvious (which I hate to do) - if you want to change smth in your song, it's way better to do it once than to repeat it manually in every stanza (and no, copy-paste will NOT work when you need to change notes but to keep the lyrics).
If anyone wants to sing my song, he'll listen to the music and not read the print.
And if you know smth on medieval music, your advice is welcome here: https://musescore.org/en/comment/1136598

Nested repeats is a common issue with writing music for musicians who play for morris dancing.
Using nested repeats, all of the music for the dance, "Bean Setters" can be written in twelve bars.
The first part of the sequence is Part A (4 bars) twice.
The rest of the sequence is [Part A twice, followed by Part B (8 bars) four times], all repeated four times.
What is the most efficient way to write this sequence in Musescore?
You can see the Bean Setters music at https://musescore.com/user/89639/scores/7080819

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