Courtesy accidental on tied note ignored later in measure

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Normal == Natural? Select, pressing and press Del or select note and then press ↑

I was looking for a previously submitted feature request to call this a duplicate but it seems I never filed it.

When the first note of a measure is tied to a note in a previous measure, any accidentals (shown or not) on the note is supposed to affect all later notes in the same measure. In the example on the original post in this, the second D should default to a D#, but MuseScore makes it a D-natural. It is impossible to delete this natural even though the courtesy (continuation) accidental is present in the measure. It should be possible to delete the natural. To make it a D#, it is necessary to apply the # accidental to the note. If you don't want to see the #, you must make it invisible. This is against the rules of music. It might be debated that if there is no courtesy accidental the second one should be a natural, but the rules I learned are that if a note has an accidental, shown or not, all notes later in the measure have the accidental.

In practice, I have almost always seen a courtesy accidental to show that it applies to the entire measure, as in the example picture above. The difference is that it applies to the whole measure.

In short, the feature request its this:

When the first note of a measure is tied to a note with an accidental in a previous measure, the accidental should apply to that measure. If this is decided to not be appropriate, then if the accidental is shown on the first note of the measure, it should apply to the rest of the measure.

When the first note of a measure is tied to a note with an accidental in a previous measure, the accidental should apply to that measure.

I do not agree with this. Furthermore, it seems that the code was specifically written to prevent this.

If this is decided to not be appropriate, then if the accidental is shown on the first note of the measure, it should apply to the rest of the measure.

This, in my opinion, is the problem that wants fixing, and I believe I have found the solution.

I agree that an accidental from the first measure should not be assumed to apply to the second just because there happens to be a tie. This case is a source of enough confusion that the practically universal recommendation is to always be explicit about the next occurence of that same note. So, with an F# tied in from the previous measure, the next F should always get either a sharp or natural, and should never be left unadorned. That is indeed what we currently enforce - the only way to get the next F to not show either a sharp or natural is to hide it.

I also agree that adding a courtesy accidental within the tie (which is not standard generally considered a bad idea except across line breaks, but anyhow) should defeat this forced accidental. And without compiling and testing for myself, it does look like Matt's proposed fix would be good. Certainly seems the right idea.

I already admitted that expecting the unadorned modified tied note to apply to the rest of the measure is controversial and that I've seen very few instances where an accidental is not used to clarify this. I think an accidental should always be used to clarify it. As far as the continuation accidental is concerned, it is very common in real world scores to have this in two cases. First is when there is a system/page break so the musician/conductor doesn't have to turn pages to decide which note to play. Second is when the accidental applies to later notes in the measure. Some editors use the courtesy accidental on all tied notes. I wouldn't do this, but that doesn't make it wrong. I'll admit I've seen scores where the editor put an accidental on the second occurrence of the note in the measure but not the first, but this is not universal or even more common. What is undeniable is that if the courtesy accidental does appear on the first note of the measure it applies to every occurrence of that note in the measure. The work around to hide it should not be necessary.

FWIW, I've virtually never seen courtesy accidentals on the tied note except across line breaks, whether or not the note appears later in the measure. The standard is absolutely to place it on the next occurrence of the note. But in any case, we are definitely in agreement that if the user does place a courtesy accidental on the tied note for whatever reason, it should eliminate the automatic accidental on the next occurrence of that note, and that's exactly what the proposed change does from what I can tell. So everyone should be happy.

In the example on the original post in this, the second D should default to a D#, but MuseScore makes it a D-natural.

With my new version of the patch, this is fixed as well.

Also, deleting the courtesy accidental changes the pitch of the note and breaks the tie. Instead, it should simply remove the accidental, not change the pitch, and not break the tie. My newest version of the patch fixes this as well.

Fixed in branch master, commit 0bce043c93

fix #274028: Courtesy accidental on tied note ignored later in measure

Fixed in branch master, commit 292446659f

Merge pull request #3793 from mattmcclinch/274028-courtesy-accidental

fix #274028: Courtesy accidental on tied note ignored later in measure

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.