Barbershop music (vocal) setup, and the Mixer

• Oct 28, 2020 - 22:37

How do you write Barbershop (male) music such that mixer allows to control tenor, lead, Bari and bass separately. I composed this as part of Marc's harmonisation course, using the standard setup, but I can't use the mixer to isolate or vary the volume for each part. I have written a string quartet (not necessarily a good piece), and the setup there allows me, I assume because there are 4 separate staves. How do I do it for barbershop vocal music?
I am very new to Musescore, and find it an amazing tool - but I have a lot to learn....


Comments

To have such control you need 4 staves as in your string quartet. In a barber shop quartet that means Tenor, Lead, Bari and Bass staves. You can't adjust the volume of voices 1 & 2 in a staff separately.

In reply to by mike320

Thank you - I had sort-of worked that out. I took the painfully-slow route of copy-and-paste from the 2-stave file, and deleting one of the voices in each new stave of the new 4-stave file, but there must be a better way. The problem is solved now that I know not to use the Barbershop men template, but I would like to know the easy way of converting one that has already been written.
See the result attached.

Attachment Size
Greensleeves_4_staves.mscz 22.91 KB

In reply to by Rod Woodhouse

It's easy to split the voices. Add the Lead staff under the T/L staff and the Bass under the B/B staff. Select the T/L staff (click the first note and press ctrl+shift+end) then use Tools->Explode and all of the notes from the lead will be in the second staff. Do the same on the B/B staff and you'll have 4 staves you can name appropriately in staff/part properties. You may need to fix a few dynamics but otherwise it should be almost perfect.

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