Suggestion (possibly for plugin creators): Split [Instrument] into [Instrument I] and [Instrument II] and vice versa
Hey everyone,
As a composer/arranger who mostly works with choral music, it's sometimes very useful for me to split and merge the vocal parts. For example, the Soprano part might need to split into Soprano I and Soprano II for a few measures and then merge back together.
As best I can tell, the only way to do this in MuseScore at the moment is to have three parts on the score marked as Soprano, Soprano I, and Soprano II, and then make extremely judicious use of the "Hide Empty Staves" tool. This makes the engraving process for complex choral music agonisingly slow.
This is definitely something that I would use very frequently in my work. It might not be top priority for all users, since I believe this kind of part splitting is very uncommon outside of choral music, but it would be an enormous timesaver for me.
Comments
Hmm, can you post an example and explain what in particular about hiding empty staves was slow? Should take only seconds to enable that when you're done with the score - just leave it off until then.
In reply to Hmm, can you post an example… by Marc Sabatella
I guess you have gained the impression that three staves would be needed from this thread https://musescore.org/en/node/333416 To be clear, that suggestion was made to avoid the necessity to have multiple instrument changes to update the staff labels. It is possible to achieve the same visual result by adding only a second staff. Then to meet the needs of the OP of that other at the start of a divisi section you would also need to add an instrument change and change only the staff label. Another instrument change would be needed when the sopranos revert to unis. With three staves the labels remain fixed for each staff and instrument changed are not needed.
In reply to I guess you have gained the… by SteveBlower
I would add, everyone's way of working and conceptualizing things is different, so its great that MuseScore provides options. Personally, I'd find it simpler to have the three staves, even though I was one of the people advising on how it could be done with only two if preferred, because it seems the OP of that thread did have very specific ideas on that topic based on other considerations. But for most people, I think the three-staff method is simpler and what I'd normally recommend.