possible to change setting fo slur placement
I use musescore daily for editing piano music (I am a piano teacher). Something that is a pain point for me is the automatic placement of the slur touching the note heads of the notes they are connecting. I prefer there to be more distance between where the notes are and where the slur begins and ends (same for ties). I see that there are slur settings for changing the vertical height it is from the notes, as well as settings related to the thickness of the line. But is there any setting for the horizontal width? I I end up having to individually correct every single slur or tie to look the way I prefer for my own ease of reading and it's just so time consuming! Whatever the automatic placement setting is doesn't work for me, and I'm wondering if there is a way to make a setting that can become adjustable for users to have their own slur style preference. It would save me SO much time!
Comments
You don't say which version of MuseScore you are using. It would help if you could confirm that point and also attach an example score (.mscz file) here, to show the problem you are having with MuseScore's default placement of slurs.
Apologies! I've never posted on here before. I use musescore3, and have attached a short example of the automatic placement, and how I generally adapt it to look. I would LOVE it if there was a way to be able to adjust the automatic placement of all the slurs in a single setting, so that I wouldn't have to adjust each one in a score. For example, I'm editing the whole Brahms violin sonata in G major, and it's taking so much time to adjust every single slur to my preference.
In reply to Apologies! I've never posted… by Elizabeth Goodenough
What you are looking for is a fundamental change to the complicated layout algorithm for slurs. That is a very big ask, and quite a number of improvements were already made to slur and tie layout between MS3 and MS4,
Here are some thoughts:
1. I still use MS 3.6.2, for various reasons. But there is no more official development for the MS3 code. All future development efforts are concentrated on MS4.
2. Even in MS4 I cannot see any properties of a slur which would completely solve your problem, by changing settings accessible through Format > Style... > Slurs & ties
3. The MuseScore design for slur placement is probably based on the rules and guidance in Elaine Gould's authoritative handbook of music notation "Behind Bars" (published by Faber). See pp. 109-114.
4. The single slur example which you provided covers only one situation, but there would be many other cases. For example: notes on ledger lines, notes with differing stem directions, and so on.
5. Even the single example which you showed requires multiple manual adjustments:
a) lower the slur to avoid staff lines
b) move the left anchor to the right, away from the centreline of the first notehead
c) move the right anchor to the left, away from the centreline of the last notehead
d) flatten the curve of the slur slightly
I don't know much about plugins, but perhaps someone could write a plugin screen where you could set various parameters and then apply those offsets either to a selected passage or to all slurs in the score. Plugins are small standalone programs which are not part of the MuseScore's core code, and they interface with MuseScore using an API (application programming interface).
But I honestly don't think that you will persuade the development team to offer such an interface as part of the core code in MS4. It would be worth specifying the requirements in much more detail, and then posting again - probably in the Engraving forum. And if you get a refusal in the Engraving forum, then ask if anyone in the Plugins forum could help you by writing a plugin?
In reply to Apologies! I've never posted… by Elizabeth Goodenough
It would seem that, for now, you will have to take the extra step of dragging the slur or tie away from the notes. The only thing I can say is that, aren't you glad you aren't writing it out by hand. I come from a time when that was the only option.
FWIW, Sibelius (which predates the Gould book) has the same default placement.
MU4 doesn't maintain your slur placement. I opened your score in MU4 and both slurs were the same. I don't have MU3 on this computer because I don't have a use for it. But that's me.