Hairpin gets placed over wrong bar
In the first bar shown (in the image ‘hairpin after’), I inserted a hairpin with the ‘>’ key, and it worked out nicely. Now i wanted to do the same in the second bar, but instead it gets placed over the third bar. The same happens if I copy and paste the hairpin.
As a workaround, I tried to move it manually to the correct bar, but there are at least two problems with that, as shown in ‘hairpin stuck’:
1. It is glued to both the ‘ppp’ to its left and the ‘p’ to its right and moves them along with it.
2. Once moved up to the position shown, it is stuck there and can't be moved any lower.
Actually, because the dynamics here take up much more horizontal space than the notes, my preferred layout would be to display the dynamics letters below the hairpins, which would save a lot of horizontal space. Should I open a different topic for that?
(OS: Windows 10 Version 2009 or later, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore Studio version (64-bit): 4.4.2-242570931, revision: 3130f97)
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| hairpin after.png | 21.27 KB |
| hairpin stuck.png | 22.74 KB |
Comments
It is difficult (impossible?) to see exactly what is going on from a picture. Please attach the score (.mscz file) so that someone can investigate further.
One thing I do see in the picture is repeated dynamics, ppp followed by ppp and p followed by p. What are you trying to achieve? What arrangement of dynamics and hairpins are you aiming for?
In reply to It is difficult (impossible?… by SteveBlower
Yes, it is impossible with the picture I posted. Partly this is because the picture shows the file as I don't want it.
But I now realize that this is probably a simple understanding issue on my part. I boiled it down to the very simple attached file and the question:
The file just consists of one note. I need a hairpin over it that shows ‘p’ at the beginning and ‘ppp’ at the end. When I hover and press shift over the ‘p’, I want the red line that appears (which I presume indicates an anchor) to go from the ‘p’ to the beginning of the note. Likewise, I want the ‘ppp’ to be anchored at the end of the note. In other words: I want the ‘p’ to be anchored at the same point as the beginning of the hairpin, and the ‘ppp’ at the same point as the end of the hairpin.
Bonus question: Can I then move the texts while still keeping the connections to the notes (red anchor lines) and to the hairpin? The latter are not shown, but they appear to be there, because when I move the hairpin up a bit, the ‘p’ moves up with it.
In reply to Yes, it is impossible with… by Sebaudia
I dragged the ppp to the right. It is anchoed to the barline. Plyback mostly works.
In reply to I dragged the ppp to the… by bobjp
So it is, thank you. But unfortunately that connection is very fragile. It breaks when I move the hairpin a bit too far. I just moved it over the time signature and back and it gets all lumped together as in the image ‘fragile hairpin’. (That appears to be or at least be related to my original problem; I'm happy that we now can repro that with this very basic file.)
In reply to So it is, thank you. But… by Sebaudia
No it is still not clear to me what you are trying to achieve. Perhaps I am being dense or the minimalist example is too minimal. It is certainly difficult to reproduce the "hairpin over the wrong bar" problem in your attached one bar score as there is only one bar for the hairpin to be over.
Can you provide a picture (even hand drawn) of what you want to end up with? Is there in fact a real-life situation that you are trying to get to, or are you just experimenting to see how dynamics and hairpins behave (nothing wrong with that, of course).
In your initial post you say "I inserted a hairpin with the ‘>’ key". For that to work you must have selected something first, what was it you selected? And similarly, what exactly did you do when you were trying to "do the same thing" in the second bar. And when you say "I tried to move it manually to the correct bar". How did you try to do that, dragging with a mouse? with the arrow keys? some other way?
In reply to No it is still not clear to… by SteveBlower
What I'm trying to achieve is simply:
1. Have well defined hairpins. (I.e. hairpins that define the dynamics exactly with text at beginning and end.)
2. Avoid overly bloating the score horizontally. (This is necessary because otherwise the score will take up far too much horizontal space. Consider how much more horizontal space a well defined hairpin takes than a note.)
One possible design that does this is the attached ‘design A’, which has the beginning dynamic text top left, and the ending text bottom right of each hairpin. But that's just one option; I'm not expecting Musescore to allow that placement. Another possible design is ‘design B’. That's less ideal since it's a compromise between horizontal bloat and illegibly small text, but it's probably more realistic since it should be doable with Musescore at least in principle.
It's probably not helpful to worry about what I did originally - for two reasons:
1. I wrote the original file in an old version 3.x.
2. The problem can be reproduced with the current version with the simple file provided by bobjp. So I don't think it should matter how I wrote the original file.
But since it seems to help you, let me answer your questions anyway:
• What I had selected was the note.
• For the second note, I again selected it (don't remember if by mouse or arrow key) and hit ‘>’.
• I tried to drag it with the mouse. Now that is still relevant because I did the same thing in my previous message when I moved the hairpin over the time signature. So, following your question, I just used the arrow keys instead, and to my surprise it behaves very different then: Now the connection between the hairpin and its defining texts is broken immediately; the texts just stay where they are. Certainly not an option I would prefer, so as far as I'm concerned we don't need to pursue this path.
In reply to Yes, it is impossible with… by Sebaudia
Right now the "ppp" and "p" are both attached to the start of the bar. You'll need to add it to the end instead. Which for a single measure like this is a little tricky - normally you'd add it to the start of the next measure then move it backwards one notch (Alt+Shift+Left). But, you can just select it where it is and press Shift+Right until it reaches the end of the bar. I'd recommend deleting the hairpin then reaading it, as right now it's indeterminate which dynamic that hairpin is attached to at which end.
In reply to Right now the "ppp" and "p"… by Marc Sabatella
Thank you, Marc, for the valuable information. So it seems that by defining the texts before the hairpin I can achieve something like an anchoring behavior. I hadn't been aware of Alt+Shift+horizontal·arrow, with which, together with Alt+horizontal·arrow, I now seem to be able to horizontally position dynamic instructions without affecting their timing.
Questions:
1. Is my impression correct that there are two fundamentally different kinds of anchors or connections:
a. Layout connection among dynamic instructions: When I reposition a hairpin on the canvas, the corresponding texts get often moved along with it. (The cases when they suddenly jump around independently seem to be caused by influences of other texts. Sometimes even far distance, which is weird but presumably irrelevant for a conceptual understanding.)
b. Timing connection to music. This is the one that for dynamic texts and the right end of hairpins get changed with Alt+Shift+horizontal·arrow; for the left end of hairpins it seems to be set and sometimes reset with the horizontal layout positioning. There seem to by no timing connection among dynamic instructions.
2. Is there a way to control the timing connection of the left end of hairpins? Or can one rely on them to always remain anchored to the same time point as the connected left text? (If so, is there a way to undo the connection other than by deleting the hairpin and reinserting it elsewhere?)
3. For the hairpins there seem to exist no control like Alt+horizontal·arrow. In line with the sequence you recommended, I presume one can rely on them being anchored to the left and right texts?
4. When I try to move the hairpin with the connected texts one step up or down by pressing the up or down key, the text to its right unexpectedly moves so far left that it completely overlaps the hairpin. Is that a bug?
5. Partly there seems to be some intelligent intention behind that behavior. But there is no way to move them that simply leaves their relative position intact, correct?
6. On pressing the shift key when a dynamic mark is selected, zebra stripes are displayed underneath the note the dynamic mark is anchored to. For a whole note in common time, there are 8 stripes. The rightmost possible anchor point is the edge between the 7th and 8th stripe; which would mathematically mean an eighth note before the end. Is that what is meant? For a note without articulation that may make sense since it's not held out for the whole duration. But when the note is marked as tenuto, it's still not possible to select its end, which seems to contradict my assumption.
7. It takes two entries of Alt+Shift+horizontal·arrow to move an anchor by one stripe. (Let me call these ‘odd’ and ‘even entries’.) Is my observation correct that only half of the entries move the anchor? More exactly: Each odd entry places the anchor at the same position as the adjacent right even entry, with the only difference that the text itself is moved far to the left, similar to when the user presses some 25 times Alt+Left. What's the purpose of that?
8. Is there no key for vertical positioning? At least Alt+vertical·arrow isn't doing the trick, and with the mouse I can move them upwards, even though they're already too high, as . This has two corollary questions:
9a. How can I bring the ‘mp > pp’ in the attached ‘2 decrescendi’ to the same height as the ‘p > ppp’? I don't know a key combination for that, and with the mouse I can only move it up.
9b. I guess there's no way to move the texts under or over the hairpin, as in my attached preferred ‘design A’?
10. If the answer to 9b is ‘No’, what way would you recommend to achieve ‘design A’? Insert hidden notes that might force the bar to become wider, so that there is some room for the dynamic instructions to be displayed side by side?
11. Is there any way to copy an existing well-defined hairpin from one note to another? When I try that, I get the ugly blob shown in ‘3 decrescendi.png’.
In reply to Thank you, Marc, for the… by Sebaudia
I'm not sure I understand all your questions, but:
no, where that dynamic is attached controls both layout and playback, there is no separation between the two.
see 1
It's never Alt+left/right to adjust, it's Alt+Shift+Left/Right (to select the end of a time slice) or just plain Shift+Left/Right (to select the beginning). Alt+Left/Right alone is for selection/navigation, not editing.
hard to say, please give precise steps to reproduce
I don't understand the question
see 3
see 3
Up/Down will adjust the vertical position of any element - for hairpins, that requires first selecting the appropriate handle
that file has some strange manual adjustments to it, so step one is to reset them, then things should work more normally
no reason you can't achieve your preferred design, just disable the appropriate "snap" option for the hairpin
copy/paste works in general, but if something has manual adjustments made, those adjustments might not make sense applied to a different destination, which has different context, different measure width, etc
In reply to I'm not sure I understand… by Marc Sabatella
Thank you for your lightning fast reply, Marc!
Question 1 and 2: I need to let that sink in before I can reply. Just one understanding question: By “attached controls”, did you mean “attached to a note, then it controls” or “attached to controls”, with “controls” as a noun as a more generic term for notes, rests and the like?
Question 3: If by “adjust” you mean ‘adjust the timing’, then you're misunderstanding me. My intention is to adjust the layout while leaving the timing (or anchoring to the music) intact.
Question 4: That's easy: 1. Select the hairpin; 2. Press the up or down key once.
Question 5: I want to do the same thing Paint (or any other simple image editor) does when you select the dynamics instructions, copy them to clipboard and paste that somewhere else. Everything in the copy should just look as in the original. (What should change - as it correctly does - is that the anchoring should be to the note I selected when I hit Paste, but that's something that only shows when you press the shift key.)
Question 8: That's what I would expect, but when I try it in ‘2 decrescendi’, nothing happens.
Question 9: I just did so with Ctrl+A, Ctrl+R, as Jojo wrote at https://musescore.org/en/node/360699 . Now it is is illegible - see ‘3 decrescendi reset’. The “strange manual adjustments” were the only way I could make it legible - using the key combinations I became aware of thanks to you. Is there any way to make that legible without those adjustments? (It's a pity this isn't already so after Ctrl+R, but I'm hoping at least for another key combination that arranges them without overlap.)
Question 10: Since for design A, I want both texts on different lines, I disabled both ‘snap to previous’ and ‘snap to next’. Unfortunately, that doesn't allow me to place the ‘p’ anywhere near the hairpin. Either it is way above it, or, as in the attached picture ‘both snaps disabled’, it is below it and both together move way above the ‘mp’.
Question 11: The ugly blob comes already when the adjustments are reset - see my comment to Question 9. The context dependent adjustments you mention would probably not be needed if Ctrl+R just arranged the parts without overlap. Still, in my case, the context should be simple, since the notes are just whole and half notes.
In reply to Thank you for your lightning… by Sebaudia
In reply to The words "attached" and … by Marc Sabatella
Question 1 and 2 (your # 1): Thanks for the clarification. That differs from my impression, so I'll need some time for an appropriate answer.
Question 3 (your # 2): Thanks for your explanation. Disabling the snap options certainly improves the behavior, and I can imagine the remaining issues will go away once I disable autoplace, as you recommend wrt question 10.
Question 4 (your # 3): I meant the hairpin in bar 1 in file ‘2 decrescendi.mscz’. But it reproes with the hairpin in bar 1 in ‘3 decrescendi.mscz’, too.
Question 5 (your # 4): OK, let's spin that off.
Question 8 (your # 5): Again, all I did was to use the key combinations you recommended. How in the world such a harmless operation can give "strange" results that leave Musescore unable to move a hairpin is beyond me. (You bring up the same point in your answer to question 10, so I dedicated it a whole paragraph below.)
Question 9 (your # 6): Sorry, that doesn't seem as obvious to me as to you. If anything, it should be easier for the program to handle fewer notes. But your suggestion might still help: Would it help if I added a second voice that consists entirely of semiquaver rests? Of course, that would still bloat the bar horizontally, which is something I want to avoid - and which is commonly avoided in professional prints. (In that case I disagree with your statement that "widening the measures makes more sense". The professional solution of course would be to do it for a few bars and then just write "simile", but I don't know how to to make Musescore understand that.) Still, it's probably worth trying since it would allow me to move on.
What do you mean by "your specific adjustments didn't make sense."? All I did was to spread out the legible blob; in trying to make it legible I admittedly moved some things back and forward, which in hindsight of course doesn't make sense. But since each of the moves should be reversible, and the result, which is just be the vector sum of all individual moves makes sense, I can't imagine any side effects remaining that don't make sense. Or do the moves not simply add up like vectors and it is possible to reach a point of no return just by adding them?
Question 10 (your # 7):
Since I did, as you recommended, disable the snaps, and t sounds like you didn't disable autoplace I don't understand why you can't repro the behavior I'm experiencing. I will experiment some more with it and also try disabling autoplace (per this discussion:
https://musescore.org/en/node/292662, in which you also were involved); maybe we will know more then.
In reply to Question 1 and 2 (your # 1):… by Sebaudia
I think one basic thing you are probably missing here is that MuseScore doesn't automatically widen measures for things like dynamics - in most cases, the width is determined solely by notes and rests and a small handful of markings that almost always require extra space. That is why if a measure is too narrow, there might not be room for multiple dynamics and hairpins, and you get those ugly messes. Again, in these highly unusual artificial stripped down cases like your examples, this might seem a big problem , but it happens much more rarely in real-world scores. And in such cases, the easiest solution is just to widen the measure. It would be pretty rare to have measures that need to remain this narrow and then have to fiddle with the dynamics the way you are. So that's why the defaults behaviors aren't optimized for that rare special case.
Anyhow, when I say your adjustments don't make sense, I see separate offsets for the dynamics and the hairpin, and yet also they are still set to snap. You are basically asking MsueScore to go to war with itself over where these things should go, which is why fjurther adjustments to just one of these might not have an obvious effect - the other manual adjustments are fighting for control. Not saying it necessarily has to be that way, but again you are taking rare cornet case situation and then applying highly unusual and ultimately counterproductive manual adjustments. So it shouldn't be too surprising the behavior becomes hard to predict. That's why I recommend starting over armed with better information about how these things work, so you can apply adjustments more effectively.
Disabling snape does indeed still cause horizotnal adjustments to dynamics to adjust the haipin start to avoid collision or overlap. So, then you can simply adjust the hairpin as well if you want overlap.
Isn't this what's addressed in this posting
https://musescore.org/en/node/366024
In reply to Isn't this what's addressed… by TomStrand
Thank you. This is more a description of how the feature is supposed to work, rather than of how to solve its problems. It does have a nice list of keyboard shortcuts, though, some of which aren't even covered in the dedicated handbook page https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/adjusting-elements-directly.
In reply to Thank you. This is more a… by Sebaudia
For the record, some of this is brand new - the attachment shortcuts came out in 4.4 only a month ago - and indeed, sometimes the Handbook lags slightly.
But yes, the Handbook is designed to describe how the features work, not to be a tutorial demonstrating specific use cases.