Small notes in drum staffs...possible?

• Dec 9, 2015 - 21:00

Hi, there.
I am working on drum parts for a Big Band Piece. I want to give that parts the scheme of the brass line.

It should look like the following example from Tim Davies' website.
http://www.timusic.net/jazz/jazz-notation-chords-drums/#.VmWRE79RIzI
(who writes much about sheet music layout, scoring, conducting,arranging, orchestration etc., interesting for many of us here, I think)

Drums-complete-line.jpg

Do anybody know about a way to achieve this?

Thank you in advance.

Oli


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

Thank you, but sorry: my mistake. I asked the wrong question
I knew how to make things smaller.
I just don't know the right word for that purpose, where some notes of a "foreign" part is displayed, just for orientation, not to play them. Since the note entry in drum staffs differs from the note entry in standard staffs, I don't know how to do that.

Oli

I think the OP means to copy ALL the notes from the treble clef to the drumset and then make them small. In which case, that's exactly what you do. Select all the notes in the treble staff, copy them and paste in to the drumset. Then select all the notes in the drumset and make them small.

Ah, but to get the appearance as intended - complete with the slashes - you need to get a bit more sneaky than that. GoTo Edit ->Tools ->Fill with Slashes.

In reply to by underquark

Thank you, too
I wanted to keep my drumstaff as a the type "drum staff", because there are these other 95 bars in the piece... I've tried to insert the brass rhythm as high toms, but manually in VOICE III, so the stem direction is up, but there is no interference with the default drum set definition.
In the inspector I made these notes small and muted. That worked. See: brasskicksInDrumstaff.png

Thank you very much

Actually, this is extrtemely easy to do in MuseScore - we provide a special facility just for this purpose! It's found in Edit / Tools and is called Toggle Rhythmic Slash Notation. Simply enter the rhyhm you want into voice 3 using any pitch you want, then select the passage, then run that command. It automatically moves the notes to the top line, makes them small, mutes them, etc. You can then also run Edit / Tools / Fill With Slashes to fill voice 1 with slashes.

Actually, since entering notes into voice 3 isn't so easy for drums, you can use the following technique to make it even easier:

1) enter the rhythm into voice 1 (eg, by using snare drum)
2) select the passage
3) Edit / Voices / Exchange Voice 1-3
4) Edit / Tools / Toggle Rhythmic Slash Notation
5) Edit / Tools / Fill With Slashes

Give it a shot! The following was done using that exact sequence of operations:

drum-rhythmic.png

In reply to by olivo

Just to ask: Do you know the word for that kind of notation?

ADDITION:
I tried it out and the combination of the several replies worked best, because the brass parts were already there:

So:
1) Copy the section of interest into the drum staff

2)Swap Voices 1-3

3)toggle rhythmic slash notation

4)Fill with slashes

That took me about 8 seconds. Perfect

Solved!

In reply to by olivo

You're welcome :-)

I don't know of a word for that specific style of notation. "Rhythmic notation" is a term for the general idea of notating rhythms with indefinite pitch, but it applies both to that style as well as this, which would be common in piano and guitar parts:

The same "Toggle Rhythmic Slash Notation" command will create that automatically if you enter notes into voice 1 instead of voice 3.

BTW, for ordinary pitched staves - eg, for lead sheets - when entering rhythms into voice 3, we render this "rhythmic notation" slightly differently, using slash heads and floating the notes slightly above the staff, in accordance with common practice:

See the Handbook under "Tools" for more info (that's where these images came from).

I do a lot of these types of arrangements so I was very eager to make these different use cases work well. I'm quite happy with what we came up with in terms of the overall usability and the results obtained, but it is admittedly non-obvious to figure out.

In reply to by Isaac Weiss

Not at all...
I used Notion before. In terms of notation and the influence the user has to the final product (sheet music) Notion is really underdeveloped. But every Notion user knows how to get the rhythmic Slash notation for guitar, because it is actually being played if the chords are set, too...Nice handy benefit, what do you think?

But this and one other thing are the only things I miss in MS a tiny little bit...

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