Chord scrub - arrangement wide chord hearing
Hi,
I know this has been suggested in the comments, sorta, in this thread:
https://musescore.org/en/node/6223
But I couldn't find an actual implementation of a feature I think is very intuitive and apparently has some more people that want it.
What I want:
In another editing program, I can hold a button (for example the play button) and it will continuously play just the chord I had a note selected from and not move on. If I move the mouse while holding the button, I can go back and forth between chords and focus in on particular harmonies or difficult spots in my score.
Currently, I'm fidgeting around with pressing play really fast a bunch of times which is a bit annoying. It also Makes it harder for me to work on large orchestral scores and makes my writing process a bit less organic. It's really quite enjoyable to just add notes in a harmony here and there and to hear it back and test it out, and I miss not being able to do that quite a bit.
So, hopefully other people would like this too, or even better, I've missed where it's at in Musescore and someone who's better at searching will tell me how to achieve this.
Comments
Chord symbols playback is implemented since quite a while.
As is playing the entire chord during note entry
In reply to Chord symbols playback is… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks for the feedback, however, that's not what I'm trying to describe unfortunately.
At least, not if I look at https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/playback-chord-symbols-nashville-nu….
What Jeetee describes is closer to what I mean, but it requires many more steps and hassle than other software.
I realize that perhaps it is abstract, but in practice I really want " One button"/"One press" , that instantly lets me hear all the notes across ALL the parts, and then holds them. And then if I click a different option , or ideally hover the mouse over a different note, I hear that option. (it's one of the few finale options I really like.)
To illustrate this, lets say its the middle mouse button. I press it, and I hear the chord across all the staves. I move the mouse around and it plays the notes as I go. having done so, I find the spot that is jarring. Go over it a few times, and find out which notes in the run are off, or which register jump from an instrument sounds less nice than I anticipated. The ease of use really helps improve my hearing, and makes me able to work much faster. (perhaps if I was a jazz theory genius I wouldn't need this so much, but alas.)
The tempo solution from Jeetee would require me to go back and forth clicking tempo changes, which makes it much less useful and intuitive since the back and forth stops the flow. It's hard to explain but being able to directly hear, move and work on a detail level is really useful, and natural feeling.
If this doesn't work as an example maybe I can find another way to show it in video or something. It's quite a literal click function in a competitors software package that I'm looking to break free from.
Alternative scrubbing-like approach: turn down the tempo slider on the play panel to make playback really slow. Then use left and right arrow keys to step through the score during playback.
In reply to Alternative scrubbing-like… by jeetee
Please see my other reply to our fellow enthusiast. Your solution does achieve what I want, but at quite a bit more hassle than I think is necessary. Especially here (for me) I feel like ease of use works wonders for workflow and creative juices flowing etc.
In reply to Please see my other reply to… by Joachim Verhoog
Indeed, a built-in feature would be nice someday, and it's a common request (one of my own very first suggestions in the issue tracker way back when!), so I suspect we'll see it eventually.
But meanwhile, the tempo workaround is pretty cool, I've been using it quite a bit over the last few weeks since I first saw @jeetee point it out. And it's not even that much of hassle if you leave your play panel open and reduced in size in an out of the way place (I keep it docked lower right). Note you can quickly result to 100% by double-clicking the slider. I will say, sometimes, you might also need to change the actual tempo marking on the piece, as the tempo slider is limited to 10%.