A tempo in tempo text

• May 27, 2024 - 06:00

MuseScore 4.3 This item really frustrates me. A tempo is treated as system text, not staff text. Thus there can only be one such text item at a given point, rather than one per staff in a multi-part, multi-staff score, as is typically done in the music with which I am familiar. If one tries to add another one, it is just stacked above the first one and cannot be pulled down to a staff below. Trying to do so just spreads the staves out indefinitely.

rit. and accel. are staff text; why not a tempo?


Comments

If it's a score for a conductor to use, why would you want have "a tempo" or "rit." etc. in each staff?
Can you provide an example of music you're familiar with that is typeset that way?
At any rate, if it really is what you want, then just do it as an expression text elements (if you need the playback too, you can always have hidden tempo elements). You can create new palette entries for these, and even put them in Tempo palette and delete the factory-provided ones if you really want (though I wouldn't recommend that particularly).

In reply to by Dylan Nicholson1

Let me reply here to both of these comments.

When I said rit. and accel. are staff text, I was referring to their behavior, not their identity. They behave like staff text in that they can be attached to any note on any staff, whereas a tempo behaves like system text in that it can only be attached to a note in the topmost staff of the score. If one tries to attach it to a note in another staff, it gets reattached as a duplicate to the note in the top staff, and stacked as I described.

I do not typically write for conductors, but for instrumentalists, and each one needs to see a tempo (and rit. and accel.) on his own staff. Since writing originally I have found that the font of a tempo is editable in Properties (unlike rit. and accel.) and that by turning off auto placement I can drag it to appear on the staff where I want it. That much is helpful.

Changing the text style of tempo text globally is not something I want to do. That would affect elements I don't want to change. I'd like more control over the style individually. That's why I posted this as a feature request, not a bug report.

In reply to by Gerald Reynolds

"... but for instrumentalists, and each one needs to see a tempo" - but that's exactly what will happen in the extracted parts, providing you do actually use "tempo" elements (or anything that's consisted a "system" element).
What sort of ensembles are you writing for, out of curiosity?

Anyway as I noted in your other issue, there's certainly a case for being able to override text formatting properties for individual "gradual tempo change" elements (and potentially all "text line" elements), but I'm not sure it would be considered high priority, and would require UI design work etc. in order to ensure the text formatting properties panel was accessible when editing a "text line" (the backend support I would imagine would be reasonably straightforward).

In reply to by Dylan Nicholson1

Since you asked, I mostly write for small groups of 2-4 parts (besides piano or other accompaniment), and for those groups I often don't extract the parts (as one does not for an SATB choir, for example), so I want the full set of performance markers on every staff. (Yes, extracted parts will have them.)

In reply to by Gerald Reynolds

I perform from choral scores all the time, often having as many as 12 staves (depending on how much the choir is divided etc.). I can't say I can ever recall seeing "tempo" performance instructions duplicated on each staff.
I have seen them duplicated between the top of the score and above the piano reduction, and MuseScore can do that, but unfortunately I believe you'd have to create a custom template by editing the xml to do currently. That will likely change in future (I had hoped to get involved in implementing that, but ultimately didn't have the time).

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