Master Pitch Shift Button
Greetings! One feature that I've been looking for on Musescore 4 but couldn't find any convenient way to execute is to change the pitch of the entire score easily without changing the written notes.
For context I am a guitar player who been almost exclusively using Guitar Pro for the last 10 years, lately I've been learning how to write for bigger ensembles so Guitar Pro is becoming very limited and I need a more complete notation software, I do love that Musescore introduced plenty of amenities to guitar players lately including the Guitar Musesounds pack, but I've been missing some features that are still holding me back from going fully from GP to MS.
I do know I could just shift the entire score a few semitones up or down, but that would change the written notes and I would like my third fret on the 6th string to always display a G for example no matter if I'm using an instrument a half step down or whole step down. And I would like to do so without having to mess about with concert pitch settings since that would make the scores a pain to work with.
Guitar Pro achieves that by having a little UI element on top where you can change the pitch back and forth quickly (included picture), which comes in handy if I have a song in a tuning that doesn't match the instrument I'm using and I want to quickly change the pitch to play along the score. I would like to see a similar feature in MS4 and I'm sure a lot of guitar players would agree!
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Comments
If you are writing for larger ensembles, I assume that not all of them are guitars. These other (non-guitar) instruments need the score written in the key that the music will actually PLAY in. To have the guitar part show a capo'ed key and the other instruments show actual key, you can apply a capo to the guitar part. See the Handbook at https://handbook.musescore.org/idiomatic-notation/guitar/applying-capos.
I learned this by writing small bits (just scales) on a guitar and a piano and changing the capo of the guitar to play different scales using the same shapes.
In reply to If you are writing for… by TheHutch
Hey thanks for the reply, I was aware of the capo feature but it doesn't help much since most of the times I need to move the tuning down and not up since I play and write mostly using a guitar in D standard, before I would just change the string data in Staff Properties and just compose everything with the pitches sounding the same as it written.
But lately I found that, since I memorized the fretboard of my guitar in E standard like most guitar players, it is much easier for me to just write and compose in E standard since I can actually visualize the fingerings a lot faster.
Only when I go to record and produce the song I export the MIDI data to my DAW and lower everything down two semitones to match my guitar tuning.
I know it is a bit of an unorthodox method but it works well for me, my suggestion for the master pitch shift is more for the purpose of playing along the score so I can check if what I wrote is playable and practical.
For now all that I do is when I want to check the score I select all the notes and lower all the notes -200 cents on the properties pane, it works but sometimes it is a lot of back and forth.
Given that I know many guitar players that use lower tunings but face the same issues as I do, I believe a master tuning button would be good for this userbase.