Is there a way to swap the notes between instruments in a specific section?
I'm working on an arrangement and I've decided that in one section, I should give a different instrument the melody, and to the instrument playing the melody I should give the supporting part previously held by the first instrument.
Basically, this happens to come up a lot, and I don't like my current method of cutting and pasting one instrument's notes into a blank section to make room for the other part's notes, and then cutting and pasting the first instrument's notes into the other instrument's space. And I don't want to switch the notes for the whole piece either, so the instruments panel is no help I assume. I just want to swap the notes for that specific section. Is there any way to do this besides what I'm currently doing?
Comments
What you are doing is the only way I know. It's the standard way to do this sort of thing in pretty much any program - copy and paste using a temporary location.
In reply to What you are doing is the by Marc Sabatella
Maybe I'll make this a feature request haha
In reply to Maybe I'll make this a by Patbad73
There are also clipboard managers that would enable you to cut from one staff, cut from the other staff, paste from the most recent staff into the first staff, than paste the second-most recent clipboard item into the other staff. The weird thing is that things you copy from MuseScore show up in the list as things like
com.trolltech.anymime.application--musescore--stafflist <8c46320>, so you have to remember the order you copied them.A possible workaround that doesn't involve an 'empty measure clipboard'. This works only IF your melody lines are confined within a voice.
Select melody from Instrument one, switch voices on it. Then copy that to the destination.
From the other staff use selection tools to only select the melody which is in its own voice. Cut and Paste into first staff.
Switch voices back on 2nd staff
Anytime I have done this I just create a temporary instrument or two and cut from source staves to that/those then paste to their final destination. You can make the temporary staves any instrument you want if you need to hear playback before pasting. I find this less confusing and easier to correct mistakes.
Having said that, I can see how a swapping tool might be quite useful. After all, we can already swap between Voices and - once upon a time - I had a rudimentary Plugin that could cast those Voices to new staves.
Hello! There is actually a way of swapping instruments on muse score excluding copying and pasting. Basically, if you duplicate the melody and then right click on the instrument name (make sure it turns blue) and select Staff Properties, then you can change the instrument to a different one and if you want some parts of the melody in one instrument and others in another, then just delete the parts you don't want (as you duplicated it, there should be 2 instruments playing the same melody now).
Hope it helps!
In reply to Hello! There is actually a… by Agata9328
And in the six years since the original post the "swap with clipboard" facility has been implemented which makes this sort of thing much easier.
See https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/copy-and-paste#swap-notes