vocal staff vs. instrument staff settings

• Sep 8, 2015 - 21:05

I don't have a copy of the Gould book, but in my experience vocal staves tend to have items like dynamics markings & hairpins set above the staff, instead of below the staff like instrument staves. (I assume this is to make room for lyrics.)
Assuming my understanding of this is correct, is it possible to have MuseScore default the placement of these items differently for vocal staves than instrument saves, so that they don't have to be manually adjusted?
Thanks,


Comments

This would have saved me hours of work for last couple of vocal scores I've made. Dynamics above should definitely be the default, though there are plenty of common exceptions so a more versatile solution would be ideal.

In reply to by to7m

It is not currently possible to have different defaults for different staves. However, it takes only seconds to fix manually. After entering all dynamics, right click one on a vocal staff, Select / All similar elements in same staff, and change the offset in the Inspector. Repeat for other vocal staves, and for hairpins.

In reply to by to7m

Also, to be clear - you *can* change the defaults, via Style options - you just can't have different defaults for different staves. So if you prefer to make the default above the staff, you can do that, for bth dynmamics and hairpins - but then you'd have to move them for the instrument staves the same way I just described.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I noticed while working with the Style settings there is a "Apply to all Parts" button that is always grayed out. **Is this a "for future use" item, or does the button become active in some situations?**

For what it's worth, I created a "Vocal Staves" style and made a test score, hoping I could copy the vocal staves into an instrumental score with the revised hairpin & dynamics positions intact. Unfortunately the style settings of the instrumental score over-rode the Vocal Staves settings. If the F6 Selection Filter had a "Style Settings" line that would allow the original settings to not be over-ridden, that would be a helpful work-around (although I don't know if it would be more effort than it is worth).

I don't want to make this seem bigger than what it is; most of these items require manual tweaking due to collision avoidance issues anyway, and MuseScore has made great strides in this area with the latest releases!

In reply to by marty strasinger

Re: parts - this specifically refers to the parts you generate via File / Parts - the individual parts for each instrument.

Not quite understand what you mean about the copy/paste. What exactly were you trying to accomplish? If you moved positions manually, those adjustments should be carried over, but will be applied relative to the defaults in the destination score. Style settings are indeed not copied. You can save a style and load a style (Style / Save, etc), and you can also create templates so that your favorite style settings for a given score type sare applied automatically (just save a score into your templates folder and it will be available in the template list after restarting MuseScore).

Jojo & Marc, I understand now about the "Apply to all parts" button, thanks.

Re: what I was trying to accomplish with the copy/paste, was to have vocal lines with the dynamics & hairpins already correctly positioned for vocals, and to copy that into another score hoping that the positioning would remain. Basically, I was looking for another work-around, hoping that the default style would transfer along with the copy/paste. Unfortunately it didn't pan out; as you indicated only manual adjustments from the default style remain.

Thanks very much for the help,

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