How to have different key signatures in different clefs?

• May 5, 2015 - 18:22

Hi, I'm very new to constructing sheet music in general. The question is, you know how you have your treble and bass clefs? I just want a certain key signature for the treble clef and a different key signature for the bass. :)

Please tell me what my question should sound like. I am very ignorant about all this. :D

Problem: I try to drag a different key signature to either treble or bass clefs and it changes both to what I was only aiming to change one of them! Thank you for your patience and help.


Comments

If you are new to constructing sheet music in general, you might not know that what you are describing is almost never done. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Do you have some very unusual / special reason for it? If you are writing for piano, for example, be aware that virtually no pianists would be able to successfully read your music without a *lot* of difficulty.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

"you might not know that what you are describing is almost never done"
It is quite frequent in early music from the renaissance, and someone might want to respect this notation. I wouldn't say it's a priority, of course, but speaking of "music in general" shouldn't exclude some parts of music history ;-)

In reply to by Alain Naigeon

Can you give us an example? The question says "different key signature", but then the discussion turns to "different time signatures". As far as I know, renaissance music did not use time signatures at all, and was typically much freer with time. But for "different key signatures", as Marc says, this is almost never done -- I think I have something Latin-American somewhere with wildly different keys, but it is extremely hard to imagine this in the renaissance.

In reply to by Imaginatorium

I would say that both different key signatures for different staves and different time signatures for different staves are rare but certainly not unheard of. Neither is something your average beginner to notated music - as the OP described himself - would normally be encountering, hence my comment. But in any case, MuseScore does allow both.

I incurred in quite a lot of rock music where one musician has to play according to a certain time signature, while another has to play according to a different time signature. The kind of effect they have to achieve is different from the one described by Jojo's method (Ctrl-drag a different time signature), as both musician should follow the very same beat, but barlines, as well as accents, would be "out-of-sync". You can listen to a high-end example of this kind of music here. I think the theory involved in this sort of composition goes back to Steve Reich and his studies about minimalism, and I always found that "regular" time notation does not make it easy to understand the real musical meaning of the out-of-sync, in-sync nature of tracks like these. Indeed, for the sake of precision, I would notate music like that in a form like this:

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In reply to by Esteban Earlin…

If you want the measures the same duration - so the barlines align - then use Ctrl while adding a time signature. If you mean you the *beat* the same duration - so the barlines *don't* align - then you can simply make the barlines in one part invisible (click, press V) and add "fake" barlines to the other as needed (click a note, double click barline in palette).

Sorry, mates! I just realized that dwb92 was taking about KEY signatures, not TIME signatures. I apologize.

I do know how you have your treble and bass clefs, but are you talking about treble and bass clefs for the same instrument (piano, marimba, mouse organ)? or for different instruments? If the latter, then is one of those instruments at Concert Pitch and one transposing (say, a Bb clarinet)?

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