Chord names upper/lower case

• Dec 13, 2014 - 15:11

Hi
Windows XP, Musescore 2.0.0, Revision 1efc609.

Musescore 2 turns all my chord names into capitals.

In 1.3 I was able to have chord names in either upper or lower case.

For melodeon in 2/4 for instance we play um-cha on the bass buttons to accompany the melody;
Where um on the first beat is a left hand bass written as a capital chord name and
cha on the second beat is a left hand bass written as lower case.

Keep up the good work and thank you

exiletaff


Comments

no, in 1.3 only chords that hadn't been recognized as chords stayed lower case.
Same is true with 2.0 Beta 1, but it does a better job of recognize seemingly valid chord names.
Esp. "um" and "Um" are still not recognized and so are left as typed, but "cha" is now recognized and turned upper case "Cha", just because it starts with a valid note name, this wasn't the case in 1.x.
Anyway, none are proper chord names in the sense that they could get transposed, so there is no need to enter them as chords, just use staff text or maybe lyrics for that.
You could, however, as they are supposed to apply to bass, also enter them with a leading /, like "/Um" and "/cha", that way neither gets recognized as being valid and stay as entered

Very interesting use case, I had not heard of this. Jojo is right in his description - the only reason "cha" was rendered lower case is that it was not recognized as a chord at all, whereas now it is ("C" "ha", whatever that means). And writing it as "/cha" will prevent this, so that's a good solution if that's a common way of notating this. Can you point me to some sort of documentation or published examples so I can see how this sort of notation is actually used? I tried searching online, but while I see references to "um cha" to describe the basic tehcnique, I haven't found any published sheet music using that as notation.

Right now, I'm inclinded to suggest you not enter these as chord symbols at all, but as ordinary staff text.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I have to apologise, my explanation was not clear.
The Um Cha referred to the rythm used for the left hand which plays bass notes and chords.

I wanted to be able to use both upper and lower case in the chord symbols to indicate either a bass note (Capital letter) or chord (Lower case letter).
The tutors at a recent melodeon weekend used that notation.

I have used system text instead.

I will try to attach a .png file.

exiletaff

Attachment Size
LEARNING WINSTER GALLOP.mscz 5.27 KB

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

I see two different issues here.

With "cha", preserving case isn't good enough. We need to actually prevent this chord from being recognized at all. Otherwise, if you transpose this score up a whole step later, you'll find it changed to "dha". I could special-case that exact string if we though this use case universal enough to support this way. Or we could add some special syntax to allow you to specify that a chord not be parsed, like if you type an asterisk first. At that point, though, I could wonder why not just use staff text.

The ability to have both "Sol" and "SOL" in the same score is trickier. I initiailly got confused and though the request was to have "sol and "Sol" together, which suggested one set of fixes, but none of them actually work well for the case at hand.

Here's what I initially wrote:

Again, one possible fix would be to agree upon some special syntax to indicate a chord should be rendered lower case - like maybe if you type an underscore first. Or we could tie it to text style - if you change a given chord symbols's text style from "Chord symbol" to some new special style, it is forced to all lower case. Or I could change the "Lower case minor chords" option to simply be "Preserve case" (and remove the "Lower case bass notes") option, so it just keeps the case you type. For that matter, I could lose that option entirely and always preserve case, although this would not please people who like typing all lower case and having MuseScore capitalize for them when it recognizes a chord.

I would still need to understand more about how this convention is expected to work, and how universal this convention is, before I consider any of this.

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