Staffs and Clefs

• Jul 29, 2015 - 02:01

New-user questions:

How do I add staffs to a score? I looked in the most obvious location (obvious to me, at least), the Add menu, but it has no "Staff" option.

How do I change an existing clef? For example, I want a treble clef shifted down an octave for male voices.


Comments

Ah—you might have had an easier time finding the Instruments dialog in an older version of MuseScore (back then the Add menu was called the Create menu, actually). Now it's under the Edit menu. The logic is that it allows you to remove instruments as well as add them, so the Add menu is not quite the right place for it. Anyway, go to Edit -> Instruments or pres [i] and you'll find everything you need.

As to clef changes, clefs are in the Clefs palette, and you can change the octave of a selection with [Ctrl] (Mac: [Cmd]) + [Up]/[Down].

In reply to by Isaac Weiss

Still not working. I select the click the treble clef, and it turns blue. I hold the Ctrl+ the upper arrow, or down arrow, or page up, or page down, & nothing happens. I can open the clef palette, but don't see how to do anything with it. I drag the clef symbol to the score, but still nothing happens.

This screams out for better documentation.

I have a Windows PC. How to I shift the clef octave?

In reply to by Dick Adams

To add anything from the palette, the easiest way is to click where you want to add it (in this case, the existing clef), then double click the palette icon. You can also use drag & drop, but you have to make sure you wait until the target is highlighted before releasing the mouse.

This is documented in the Handbook - https://musescore.org/en/handbook/palettes. Also in https://musescore.org/en/handbook/clef-0, although the fact that clefs can be added via double click is brand new for 2.0.2 and not in the Handbook yet. Prior to 2.0.2, double click worked for most but not all palette elements, and clefs were among the ones that weren't supported.

In reply to by Dick Adams

To put it simply, if you want to change a treble clef part into a bass clef part and have all the music correspondingly shift and octave (or two) down, you would click on the existing treble clef at the beginning of the score, open the Clefs palette, and double-click the bass clef in the palette. (At this point, the clef would be changed, but the music wouldn't, and the notes would probably be on ledger lines above the staff.) Then, you would click on the first measure of the music to select it, [Shift]+[End] to select all the way up to the end, and [Ctrl]+[Down arrow] to transpose it down an octave.

Note that this could end up coloring some notes red to indicate that they're no longer within the instrument's range. To fix that, right-click an empty part of a measure or on the instrument name, choose "Staff Properties…", and use the "Change instrument" button at the right of the dialog that opens up to choose whichever instrument you like.

Clear enough?

I'm not trying to transpose the notes, or change the clef from treble to bass (the piece already has a bass clef). Let me restate the question to see if this makes it clearer:

I have an existing treble clef in the score. I want to make it an octave-shifted clef (because the piece is for men's voices). In most modern notation systems this is represented by the treble clef symbol with the digit "8" below it.

I am running MuseScore 2.2 under Windows 8.1

How do I make the treble "octave-shifted"?

In reply to by Dick Adams

You simply add the appropriate octave-shifted clef from the palette to your score as we've described: click the existing clef, then double click the desired octave-shifted clef from the palette. It's the exact same process as changing from treble to bass, or bass to tenor, or any other clef change - click existing clef, double click desired new clef in palette.

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