Moving lyrics from one part to another

• Apr 3, 2022 - 10:45

I often download 2-part songs, piano and vocal, so I can play piano while my wife plays the vocal part on flute.

I'd like to print out just the piano part and have the lyrics included with the part, thus reducing the number of pages as I don't need to see the staffs for the vocal part. However, when the parts are separated, the lyrics are with the vocal part and not the piano.

Anyone have a suggestion for an easy way to get the lyrics moved or copied from the vocal part into the piano part so I can print out just piano but with text included? For now I'm stuck either printing the whole score or penciling the text myself on the piano part.

Thanks!


Comments

If the piano part has the same melody as the lyrics, you can copy the lyrics normally - right-click one lyric syllables, Select / All Similar Elements, then Ctrl+C to copy, then click the first note of the destination, then Ctrl_V to paste.

If the melodies don't match, though, it's not really going to work in a meaningful way - the lyrics need notes to attach to. You could add them as staff text but they won't make much sense not being attached to specific notes.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks Mark, but yeah, the accompaniment is not the same notes as the melody, so doing this matches syllables to the next notes and it quickly becomes bizarre. Can't even do one staff at a time. I'm using your workaround under the link offered in this thread, hiding individual parts. It will be ok - but necessitated selecting in turn all rests, notes, stems, flags, ties, etc., on an on, and turning them invisible. Now I have the piano part with the lyrics above, but it's still 8 pages because the staff spacing is the still them same, and I'd much prefer 4-5 pages. May just need to pencil in the lyrics on the piano part printout myself!

In reply to by Michael Naylor

If the notes don't match, then indeed, attaching lyrics won't work. Really the simplest thing in this case is probably to type the lyrics in as staff text, either system by system or measure by measure. But if you do wish to use the invisible staff, turning everything invisible all at once is simply - just select the whole staff, use View / Select Filter to exclude lyrics, then press "V" (or if you've already done a partial job of it, uncheck Visible in the Inspector. Then use Staff/Part Properties to hide the automatically generated elements like staff lines, clef, etc.

You can also reclaim the space using fixed spacers or by setting a negative extra space above the staff or negative staff distances, and disabling vertical justification of staves and allowing negative vertical distance (settings made in Staff/Part Properties and/or Format / Style). Then if this is something you do often, you could save this as a template and future scores would be set up this way already.

Overall it would only take an extra minute or two to set up and would certainly look much better than handwriting the lyrics. If you further assistance, attach your score and we can advise further.

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