4 Time bar repeats

• Apr 18, 2023 - 12:02

Hey, I’m notating drum scores in musescore. I got to deal with alot of repeats so I was happy when the 4 time bar repeat came out, anyways, it looks really messy when the repeat itself actually takes up four bars. I’d like to place the 4 time repeat in just one bar.

Is this possible already? If so, how can I do this? I’ve tried matching four bars togheter to see if I could place a 4 bar repeat inside of that. But that isn’t possible.

If it’s impossible at the moment please add this. Because the whole effect of having a four bar repeat is to save space in your notation, otherwise I could just copy the bars anyway 4 times in a row..

To give an example, see the images below. The green one is the annoying thing- and the pure black is awesome


Comments

The symbol isn't really recommend by most publishers, but those few who do us it almost invariably put it across four measures. I wouldn't be in a hurry to deviate from that standard. It's already risky to use the symbol in the first place as it's likely to confuse many readers, but using it in a non-standard way is just going to make things worse.

T=Showing the multiple measures does still save space, because the measures are narrower. But also, that's not the main purpose of measure repeats. It's to reduce the cognitive load for the musician reading, so they know without reading it's the exact same passage they already read, and they don't have to scrutinize more closely to see if anything changed. And that's why four measure repeats are frowned upon by most editors - that increases the cognitive load again to have to remember those four bars.

That said, if you have some really unusual special reason to need to do this, you can add a symbol from the Symbols palette (in View / Master palette) to a single measure.

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