Note entry improvements?
Hello, first off thanks so much for Musescore - it's great and I use it a lot.
I have two suggestions that would make note entry much faster. I'm not sure if others would also find these useful. I have tried to suggest fixes which might be easy to implement.
- Enharmonic notes.
When entering notes with the midi keyboard, the notes are often enharmonically wrong. They are right if I'm playing in the key of the key signature, but music often modulates without a change of key signature. Whilst I'd guess it would be hard for Musescore to make an educated guess as to which note to notate, it's quite annoying to have to constantly change the same note, as often occurs. It really slows down note entry!
My suggestion is that when playing in from the midi keyboard, Musescore should look back within a part for the last enharmonically equivalent note and notate it in the same way. This way, you would only have to correct it once. It should probably only look back as far as a change of key signature. I would think that it would also be helpful if it would count notes that differ in pitch at the octave when it looks back. In an ideal world it might also look between parts or at least stages of the piano part, but even if it just looked back on the same stave it would be great.
- Triplet entry.
If I select crotchet length (e.g. 5) and then control 3 for triplets, I get to enter 3 quaver triplets. This is logical enough - the triplets fit into a crochet. Most often, I then want to enter some more triplets. So, having finished the first triplets I press control 3 again but Musescore has now selected quavers and the triplets I input are twice the speed. And so on, giving successively faster triplets. In order to input lots of quaver triplets I have to press an elaborate succession of 5 / control 3. I'm not sure if it's just me, but this really slows me down and I usually get it wrong. I have included a screenshot of what you get if after each triplet you press control 3 for some more triplets without re-selecting the base note length.
My suggestion would be that after inputting triplets Musescore remembers the original base note length so that instead of getting faster and faster triplets you can easily input many triplets of the same speed.
Many thanks for considering these improvements!
James
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Comments
For triplets, in the meantime, there are other ways to deal with this. I know not what you asked for.
In reply to For triplets, in the… by bobjp
Thanks for your reply. What are the other ways to deal with it?
Happy to explain my post further if there are any particular bits that aren't clear?
Thanks
James
In reply to Thanks for your reply. What… by jamaggs
I don't do anything that involves enharmonics.
If you know you are going to fill a measure with triplets, set it up before hand. Set up a one beat rest. Change it to a triplet. Select the triplet and hit "R" as many times as you need.
You could also fill in the notes for the the first triplet, select it and hit "R". then you have to change pitches if they need to be different.
Not as fast as your suggestion, though.
In reply to I don't do anything that… by bobjp
Thanks for your reply. I will look into those triplet methods and probably end up using them, although as you say I think my suggestion would be quicker and it would still be great to see it implemented because I think that the default behaviour is odd.
I am attaching a screenshot to show what I mean with respect to enharmonics. Imagine I'm writing a piece in D major and I modulate to D minor. For some reason, Musescore notates A# instead of Bb. And it will do this over and over again meaning that each time I play a Bb I will have to flip it from A# to Bb. That might not seem so bad, but often I will be playing in chords so as well as hitting "j" I will have to first select the right chord member.
My suggestion would be that when you play in a note, Musescore would look back to guess which note is intended. So, having corrected A# to Bb once, it would look back and guess that I want a Bb again instead of an A#. I would therefore not get any more A#s until I explicitly changed it or I changed key.
I would guess that this would be easy to implement and it would really speed up my workflow!
Many thanks
James