Is there a way to add an accidental to a note only?

• Apr 23, 2021 - 21:47

If I add an accidental to a note, other notes of the same pitch gets a natural or the same accidental, etc. I can understand why MuseScore tries to do that (because an accidental is supposed to affect all notes of the same pitch in that measure, right?), but sometimes I don't want this. Is there a way to prevent that and add the accidental to that very single note only?


Comments

No. Adding an accidental to a note changes that note's pitch and that note only. So the others (well, the next at least) of the (formerly) same pitch now need a natural to retain their pitch.
You could select the measure, right-click the note, select > more > same pitch, and then apply the accidental. Whether that is less work remains to be seen though

No, it is impossible because music notation just doesn't allow that. This is not a "limitation" of MuseScore, but just the way music is written.
So if you have a measure and want to have a F sharp with next F's in the same measure natural you must explicitly add the natural sign to the first following F.

I would say you're looking at this backwards. Say you've entered four C's into a measure in the key of C (so, no sharps or flats in the key signature). Now you add a sharp to the first C. That sharp absolutely did only affect that one note - it becomes C sharp, the rest remain exactly as you entered them - plain old C. Sounds like you are saying you only want to physically see one sharp sign, but that necessarily means all the C's actually got changed to C sharp.

So what you are really asking is, "is there a way to change the pitch of all similar notes within a measure". The answer is yes, kind of - but you need to tell MuseScore which notes to change. For example, by using Ctrl+click to select the set of similar notes. Then hit the Up cursor key to raise them all to C sharp.

I think someone did one write some code to automate this, but I don't think anything came of it. Probably it could be revisited as a plugin. Meanwhile, if it's just a few notes to select, Ctrl+click does the job nicely. If that becomes troublesome, you could always right-click one note, then Select / More, check "Same pitch" and "Same measure". Then OK, and then the Up key.

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