Center syllable between multiple notes

not automatically, but you can change the sylables' horizontal offset (via Inspector), or set them to left-align rather than center (via right-click/Text properties)

You can press the space bar rather than the _ button to make it look a little better, like your source score.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the example you posted of what you want to achieve is not centered at all. The syllables are left-aligned with the first note, exactly as the standard rules of music notation require and exactly as MuseScore does by default. It's possible your example was engraved in a century when melisma lines were not commonly used and that is why they are missing. Today there are practically universal, so I wouldn't go out of my way to omit them - today's musicians are mostly accustomed to seeing them - but if you want you can simply omit the underscore and then set the syllable to left-aligned, as suggested. I wouldn't recommend trying to center the syllable between notes - and the example you attached does not do that either - but if you want that effect, you can always use manual adjustments.

For MuseScore 3, there is already a style setting implemented to set the minimum length for the dashes, but there doesn't seem to be anything quite the same for melisma line. Probably there should be, and then in principle you could set it large enough to get the effect shown here while still showing it for longer melismas if you like. In the future, I could also imagine an Inspector setting on lyrics that says "hide melisma line".

Hi, does anyone know if there's been an update or if this feature has been added yet? Thanks.

Centring the lyrics under both notes is wrong notation and bad. Note that even the example you provided doesn’t do that. The underscore is right in the example you’ve given.

The printed exemplar achieves lack of the underscore by tightening the spacing of the beamed eigth notes. You can do that in MuseScore, and the extent of the lyrics underscore will automatically follow. (You can also use a font with wider letters or increase font size, although that won’t have as large an effect before looking bad.)

Ok, adding an option for minimal melisma length could definitely help here (at least to avoid short lines appearing as questionable 'dots', which may also appear in other circumstances). Why not also an option to hide melisma altogether... But according to https://musescore.org/en/node/305306 (see also #305594: Minimum melisma length ), these options would requires little change to the underlying data structure, and is thus unlikely to appear before quite some time.

It appears to me that there is a better option. Actually, this option was almost fully operational in musescore 3.2.3, but the latest versions (at least 3.6.2) seems to have slightly regressed in this respect (maybe because the corresponding usage was not properly identified as a feature and documented). If the solution to the question at hand here is to correct the alignment of the text "kord" and "von" from 'central' to 'left'-aligned under their first assigned note, what seems to be missing is a simple way to do that change of alignment easily. Of course, this can be done manually through the 'text formatting' interface (c.f. https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/text-basics#text-formatting ), but that is precisely not convenient. A simpler way is to simply start a melisma, by typing underscore '' at the end of the word, and interrupt it by not typing another underscore '', but rather a space ' '. In musescore 3.2.3, this has the effect of not displaying a melisma, while correctly 'left'-aligning the syllable. This behavior is not present anymore in , but I imagine it should be rather simple to (and it should not break the data format).

Note that one bug that was remaining in musescore 3.2.3, is that while the text was correctly left-aligned (this can be checked after typing with the help of the inspector), this property was not saved into the file. Again, I imagine it should be quite straightforward to save a left-aligned text as left-aligned.

In the example below, we see that the effect of using '_'+' ' is identical as what we get by left-aligning the corresponding syllable, i.e. 3rd and 4th lines are identical (here in musescore 3.2.3).

Bonus: by comparing the left-side of this example with its right-side, we can see a limit to left-aligning a syllable without knowing how many notes are concerned with its text: when the second part of the notes it is meant to be attached to is deleted, the text remains left-aligned instead of being restored into central alignment mode. This contrast with the 2nd line in this example, which uses melisma, for which this is properly handled (although a small dot remains in this ...). But the right way to fix this probably involves some data structure change, so it could be left for a major musescore update.