Orchestral staffs: unison sections with shared woodwind staffs

• Aug 26, 2023 - 16:48

I absolutely love musescore and version 4 is so fantastic, but there is still one big pain point for me:

In scores for symphony orchestra, the winds (2 flutes, 2 oboes...) usually share one common staff.
Quite often in classical music, both instruments play in unison. In scores by publishers, these sections are marked with "a2" in the score and appear in both parts (for e.g. 1st and 2nd oboe). I attached an image from the score to Dvorak 9 as an example. Currently, we have no good way to do this in Musescore.

Right now, the popper way to do this in MS is entering unison passages twice for both voices, which is quite time consuming. After I entered the passage for first voice, there is no fast way (that i know) to also duplicate it to the second voice. Right now I copy the passage to the instrument below and the use Implode to join it. Then I have to manually delete the notes from the instrument below. Or even worse: if there are already different notes entered in the instrument below, I have to copy the whole passage to some place where I still have space, implode it there and then clean everything up - this is no good solution.

I also have the problem that when I add articulation and dynamics to single notes in a unison passage, i often only add it to one voice and it's missing in the part of the other voice. The only workaround to this is selecting the unison note in both voices and then add the articulation/dynamic. This is quite hard because the note for the other voice is right behind the 1st and cannot be clicked since they are in unison.

I also always get two beams - one above and below - if I enter the unison passage in two voices. This is hard to read.

My suggestion to fix this:
- Add a feature to duplicate the selected passage to another voice or allow pasting a passage to the current voice instead replacing all voices when pasting (allow copy pasting between voices)
- Add an "a2" item to the toolbox, which internally adds the following passage to both voices and creates proper parts (including all dynamics/articulations) for both instruments.
- Analogously add a "1.", "2.", "3.", "4." to the toolbox, so the following passage applies to only this voice. This is also very common in printed orchestral scores, as it is easier to read for the conductor. The current way in musescore is adding rests to all other voices in each bar. For example, if only 1st clarinet plays, i have to manually add rests to the entire passage in 2nd Clarinet.

I just finished entering a 77 page score and manually fixing all the parts is so time consuming. So I would really appreciate, if we would have a better solution for this in the future!

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IMG_20230826_165901054.jpg 444.04 KB

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