newbie: enter/edit notes
I like being able to enter music and hear it played. This is a great app. That said....
Being a newbie at music I am having one heck of a time editing music that I have already entered. Say I want to change the duration of a note in a measure. If I select a note and change it, it changes everything around it, and so on, and so on, and I end up with a mess. So far, after playing around with the app for a while now, I have found no reliable way to edit where I don't want to put my fist through the screen. Instead, I just bite the bullet and enter the music as new, with all the notes in perfect order, and hope that I didn't get something wrong along the way. There MUST be a better way....
Is there any way to say "for now, ignore the measure", do my edits (inserts, deletes, changes), and then say "verify the measures" , with problems being noted?
BTW: I have tried joining measures, as suggested by some in the forum, to do edits but that is almost as bad as there is no way to say "when I change a note's duration don't change anything else around it" or "when I change a note's duration add/remove a rest at the END of the measure and leave everything else alone".
Thanks
--jon
Comments
If you change the duration of a note, MsueScore tries as hard as it can not to change anything else. That is, if you entered a note on beat three of a measure, it stays on beat three even if you change the duration of something that came earlier. Perhaps you are saying, you don't want some notes to stay where you put them, and instead want to move them earlier or later? Then simply do move them directly, with city and paste.
If you need further help, please attach your score and describe what you are trying to do in more detail, so we can understand and assist better.
In reply to If you change the duration… by Marc Sabatella
If I shorten a note, it adds a rest instead of closing up the notes. If i lengthen a note, it deletes the next adjacent note as needed, rather than inserting it. In other words, it would be great (for my limited music abilities) if it worked like a text editor -- insert pushes the rest down, delete pulls the rest back to close the gap.
I was hoping the checkbox I found somewhere for "don't count the measures" would do that but, alas, that is for something completely different.
On a somewhat different topic, there seems to be no convenient way to select a group of measures beyond what is seen in the current view -- the app does not do bump scrolling (drag selection off end of view auto scrolls the view in that direction). And, in page view, selection is a simple rectangle rather than following the music flow -- the app works like a pic app instead of like a text app.
Perhaps, being a newbie in music and in using this app, my mental paradigm for music and the app defaults to music being like text, with a raster like flow, which can be selected and edited like text (text-like insert/delete), whereas the app sometimes treats music like an image (selection) and sometimes like rigidly metered music (edit).
Thanks
--jon
In reply to If I shorten a note, it adds… by jonbarril
The problem with with shifting is that it is quite unclear what and how much to shift. Only this measure, all of them, up to the next rehearsal mark?
Only for this instrument or for all of them?
etc..
Music in that sense isn't like text in a text editor; it's not one line of words, but multiples all bound to each other in time.
In reply to The problem with with… by jeetee
Yes, understood, it is not quite like text, but text is such a familiar paradigm with its associated insert/delete idioms.
As for specifying the scope of the action, one could select a group of measures and apply the "ignore measure" action. This would be similar to that done for the "don't count measures" or the "join measures" actions, or the "note insert" mode. In fact, when I first tried these I expected the measure enforcement to be suspended so you could edit the notes like text (or at least move and delete rests).
Again, I'm not suggesting this just to have a bunch of new features, but because I have yet to find a good way to edit existing music other than to start from scratch. As already mentioned, as currently implemented, if you make a mistake or want to change note duration, and start editing the notes, you end up with rests in the wrong places (shorten a note) and notes being erased (lengthen a note), even though the measure count seems to be suspended (e.g. with joined measures or with a +/- at the end and no restriction on the measure length).
Might i suggest that join measures and note insert mode automatically enable text-like editing since the measure count is already suspended.
In reply to Yes, understood, it is not… by jonbarril
Again, I think you're looking at this backwards. If you shorten a note, it's a good thing that rests are added, because this has the effect not only of keeping the measure the correct length, but also of keeping other notes on the same beats where you entered them. The majority of edits are not meant to move every single other note in the score earlier, or even every other note in the measure. it would be disastrous if every time you changed a note, the other carefuly-entered notes suddenly changed positions! Text isn't like that, it doesn't care what "beat" it is on. Music does.
So again, since you are the only one who knows if you want other notes to move, and you are the only one who knows which notes you want to move (only the next note? all notes to end of measure? next four and half measures? everything to end of score?), then instead of having MuseScore try to guess what you want and have it be wrong 90% of the time, it's much more efficient for you to simply select and move the notes yourself. just as I said in the first place. Again, no need to reneter everything. just decide for yourself how many notes to move and move them yourself, takes about three seconds to cut and paste and you're guaranteed of only moving the notes you want and only when you want to move them.
In reply to Again, I think you're… by Marc Sabatella
OK. Understood. But the process you describe -- select and drag -- doesn't deal well with what I am trying to do (at least for me:-).
Ex. I have a 4/4 measure with 4 quarter notes. I want to change the second note into two eight notes. I change the note into an eight note and the app generates an eight rest after it. Now what? Perhaps it is because I don't quite understand the juggling act needed to select the right note mode (input/insert/time-step/delete for replacing the rest with a note or a note with a rest.
Ex. Again, 4/4 measure with 4 quarter notes. I want to change the second note to an eight note and dot the last note. I replace the second note with an eight note and the app inserts an eight rest. Now I select and drag the rest to the end of the measure so I can dot the last quarter note. No go. Can't move or delete rests it seems. OK. So I select the last two notes in the measure and try to drag them to where the rest is, as you had suggested. No go. The selected notes won't budge.
Am I missing some selection or action mode to achieve this kind of editing? How should I be doing it, especially the second example -- shorten one note, lengthen another in a measure. (And imagine trying to do this for several measures in a row.)
If not for what I describe, what is the purpose of the note insert mode and the measure joining/splitting actions if not to designate a scope for such free-form editing (as I and, from searching the forum, others seem to think we need)?
Thanks for you patience and help.
In reply to OK. Understood. But the… by jonbarril
I think you are still confused; I said nothing about drag. Cut and paste is the way to move a selection of notes from one time position to another. Dragging is definitely not it. And you don't move silence (rests); you move sound (notes).
Turning to your example:
You say you want to turn the second quarter into two eights. So, simply do that. Position the cursor there, enter two eighths. Since you didn't say you wanted anything special to happen to any other note, they aren't changed in the slightest. The first note on beat one remains exactly as it was, so do the notes on beats three and four.
Now, if you are saying that in addition to changing the second quarter into two eighths, you also want something different to happen to the two notes on beats three and four, then simply decide what you actually want that to be. Maybe you want to take the note that is currently on beat four and move it to beat three? Great, simply select it then cut and paste it to beat three. maybe it's not just one note you want to move, maybe you want to move the next two notes in the next measure as well. So select all three notes then cut and paste. Only you know exactly how many notes you want to move or whever you want to move them. There is no way MuseScore can guess that any more than I can.
In your second example, it sounds like you are saying you want to take the third and fourth notes and move them half a beat earlier. Again. only you can possibly guess that these are the exact notes you want to move. So simply select them (eg, click the first, Shift+click the last) then cut and paste them to the desired location - right after the eighth note you just added on beat two. You can then dot the last note if that's something else you want to do in addition to moving it earlier.
It's very simple - you have some number of notes only you can possibly know, you want to move them, so simply do it - no need to make anyone guess. Just select the notes you want to move, then cut and paste, that sim[ply, takes two seconds and you have complete control over how and when this happens.
Again, if you are still having trouble, please attach an *actual score so we can understand and assist better.
BTW, the purpose of insert mode and join measures is for creating unmetered music - music with an abritrary number of beats in a measure. This was common in the Renaissance, also for cadenza in classical music, etc. It can also be useful putting together things like scale worksheets where you just want 15 quarter notes in a measure to show a scale going up and down, etc.
In reply to I think you are still… by Marc Sabatella
OK. Thanks for the help. Cut and paste does indeed work better than drag-and-drop in the app.
Tried doing some editing as you suggest, where I am toying with trying to change 3/4 time measures to 4/4 to see how it would change the feel of the music. Could sort of do it with cut and paste but too much was lost along the way and I ended up having to just re-enter some of the measures from scratch. So be it. It is what it is, which is still a great app.
Thanks
--jon
In reply to OK. Thanks for the help. Cut… by jonbarril
Drag and drop isn't a thing in MuseScore for anything but changing the visual position of most things, not their actual position.
In reply to OK. Thanks for the help. Cut… by jonbarril
You don't say what you lost, but cut and paste should keep everything one would ever normally want to keep. It works perfectly for moving notes just as I described. So once again, if you need help, please attach your score and describe what you are doing in more detail. We love to help, but we can't do so effectively when we are only guessing as to what might be going on.