From condensed score to full score

• Mar 29, 2011 - 05:52

How is that done simply?
Say that I have a big band score on 4 or 5 staffs: saxes, trumpets, trombones and piano/bass/guitar/drums. I like to write the 5 saxes on a piano like double staff, trumpets on a single treble staff and trombones on a single bass staff. At some point I want to extend it to a full score, maybe only at the last stage, when I want to print the parts. Is there a convenient way to do that?


Comments

Not currently. You're talking about a feature like the "explode" feature in Finale. A couple of us in another thread were just discussing the need for something that in MuseScore. Hopefully some day someone will add that.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I'd like to mark one staff, then choose how many staves I want. Then the program would copy everything from the original staff to the new staves. And for each piled chord, the topmost note would go to the top staff, next to next and so on. And some simple logic would be used where you would have less notes in the chord than staves.
And if the parts are in different voices, I would check bar by bar what to extract to each new staff.
Is this something that a plugin could do? If the plugin programming interface can reach this level of functionality, I guess I'm going to get into it some day.

In reply to by jotti

Great! I just found the explode/implode plugins. They seem to work great. Though after a quick test they don't deal with several parts/voices ("stämmor" in Swedish), only with the block chords.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

The plugin framework is a bit bare bones, and even working with just block chords, the current explode & implode plugins are more limited than I'd have preferred. Eg, the need to manually copy the chords to be exploded to each of the destination staves, and the inabilty to preserves ties on implode. Basically, the framework is better at manipulating existing notes than at adding brand new ones. What I came up with is about as far as this can be taken currently, I believe.

Well, on second thought, it might be pssobile to write a plugon that helped automate an explode with multiple voices. It would require somewhat more manual intervention that the current version, though. Not only would you need to copy the source to each destination, but you'd have to do the voice exchange yourself, too, as far as I can tell. I'm still hoping to see native explode/implode support at some point.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I haven't used this feature very much, but I think the creating of additional staves and copying the original staff stuff to the new staves is not a big issue. I'm trying to figure out how some controls would make it more flexible. I have a score where the flutes mostly divide into two and sometimes into three. I'd like an option to be able to divide the condensed staff into two staves. Upper staff would have 1st and 2nd flute and lower staff would have 2nd and 3rd flute wherever the three voices are present. By voices I mean block chords written in same "voice". But this all could be set in a dialog that opens when running the explode plugin. I might as well want only the 1st voice in the upper staff and both 2nd and 3rd voice in the lower staff. Worst thing would be that the 3rd voice would be totally missing just because I wanted to split the block chords only into two staves.

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