Swing notation

• Feb 13, 2024 - 06:41

I am looking for where to find the swing notation. I did find Swing for playback in the handbook, but what it says I could not find:

Click on the note where you want swing to start;
Click Swing in the Text palette (double-click in versions prior to 3.4);

I could not find Swing in the Text palette.

More importantly, where is the actual swing notation (2 eighth notes = quarter-eighth triplet)??? I seem to recall seeing metric modulation notation (quarter = dotted quarter), so that would be a natural place to put the swing notation.

Please help; I am truly trying to figure this out myself but need assistance.


Comments

In reply to by Henk De Groot

Thank you. When I clicked Help | Online Handbook the heading says "MuseScore 4 Handbook", so I stopped looking closely, not realizing that the two handbooks are interleaved after that. I will pay more attention to that from now on.

The entry for "How to create a visual swing marking" is much too complex to reasonably recreate every time it is needed. Within the Tempo palette are the various "Metric modulations". Is there some reason the swing notation can not be included in that palette??

In reply to by tpgettys

There are two options described in the summary section.

The first is to just add an image to the score and I would suggest to use this, as it is the easiest.

The svg files can be used for this. There are also 2 musescore files listed. The images are just visual and do not make the playback swing. You can insert an image in the score as described here: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/working-images

In short the steps are:
- save the desired svg file from the website
- open a score in musescore
- open the file location where you save the svg file
- drag the svg file into the score (drop it on a note/measure/rest)

Position and size the image as desired.

The link above also contains a link to: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/palettes#add-score-elements
This contains the instructions on how to add this image to the palette.

The steps for this:
- open the palette you want to include the image
- press Ctrl+Shift and after that drag and drop the image from the score to the palette

Hope this makes it easier for you.

In reply to by HildeK

I see that now; thank you. The entry for "How to create a visual swing marking" is much too complex to reasonably recreate every time it is needed.. Within the Tempo palette are the various "Metric modulations". Is there some reason the swing notation can not be included in that palette??

In reply to by tpgettys

Of course it should only be created once and then saved in a palette.
I did this in MuS 3, but I don't have MuS 4. And the link from Henk de Groot describes it for MuS 3.

Probably the following will work:
https://musescore.org/en/node/266325#text

Insert the normal "Swing" element in text form. Double-click on the text "Swing" to select it completely and replace it with the string shown in my link, here the copy for 8ths:

<sym>textBlackNoteLongStem</sym><sym>textCont8thBeamLongStem</sym><sym>textBlackNoteFrac8thLongStem</sym> <sym>staff2Lines</sym>  <sym>textTupletBracketStartLongStem</sym><sym>noteQuarterUp</sym><sym>textTuplet3LongStem</sym><sym>note8thUp</sym><sym>textTupletBracketEndLongStem</sym>

Press ESC and select it again by a single click (changed to blue color) and drag it onto a palette while holding down the Shift and Ctrl keys.
Please also read the text at the end of my link. According to the notes there, this also works in MuS 4 with a few restrictions (text font).

  1. The text approach to indicting swing within the . . . tags seems a really good idea but there seems very little documentation on it.
  2. I want to create a textual phrase saying equal eight notes or [dotted eight note + 16th] note becomes a unequal triple. But I cant find an example of dotted notation going to compound time anywhere jpg file of what I want below
Attachment Size
swing_dottd to triple.JPG 18.03 KB

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