Icon/Button for multi-track score

• Aug 20, 2018 - 13:23

I'm not a musician, and I'm a total newbie with MuseScore; haven't placed a note yet kind of newbie.
By the same token, I can give you the most UN-tainted-by-familiarity feedback you'll ever get; but you need to take such feedback more seriously than just saying "oh, we got that, just the way to do it is... yada, yada".

Context: I downloaded this app because of a sudden and urgent need to put Jamiroquai's Time Won't Wait score on paper, so I can visualize the syncopation between the singing and the bass line. I'm a singing bass player, but this song is particularly difficult, as both the bass line AND the singing are rythmically complex. I will be in practice session with a couple of musicians some time in September, and I need to learn this by then; so I don't have weeks, or even days, to teach myself MuseScore in a slow and methodical way, starting with single scores, and eventually getting to "Advanced" features. I need to set up four instrumental lines NOW; I mean yesterday...

So, the first thing I did was to look around the icons and buttons. I was looking for some icon that would look like a 5-line pentagram with a + sign next to it to indicate it would add a new instrument. No such thing. Then I went to the help file, trying to find out how setting up for multiple instrumental lines is done. I went through the entire help file table of contents like 3 1/2 times and could not find an item that would seem to me should contain this topic or feature. Nothing, again.

So, I know there must be a very easy way to do this, and I do hope someone tells me what it is, so that I can get started with this song.

But what is more important to you is what I, as a newbie, would have expected, but wasn't there. This is precious feedback. Please, for your own sake, make such a button happen.

Comments

• Aug 20, 2018 - 13:37

Press I or use Edit/Instruments

You may want to watch the tutorials or start reading the manual. It'll save you a lot of searching and trial and error

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 13:41

You are right, there is no one-click method for adding an instrument in MuseScore. For an absolutely new user, the most instinctive place to look would be the ADD menu, but it isn't there either. Also, if you're familiar with other music apps such as a full-featured DAW, you might be looking for "tracks" which is not the nomenclature used in MuseScore.

That being said, once you get a start on things, the layout of the program is (usually) quite logical, and things do work.

Adding new instruments is accomplished through the Edit/Instruments menu. There you can select a whole range of instruments and set some basic properties, as well as set your instrument or voice placement on the staff as to your preferences. Not one-click... more likely 5 or more clicks, but in the end, you'll have things set the way you need them.

As I said, there are things in MuseScore that don't seem intuitive at first, but things do work when you know where to find them.

Welcome to MuseScore!
Regards,
Tom

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 19:47

WOW! What an incredibly detailed piece of work!
But it does not have the voices, which I need, so, not all of my work so far is totally wasted .. :-)
I'm attaching what I managed so far, for the curious.
I'd say not too bad for a total newbie.
I could not figure out the ligattos and glissandos and slides.
They just don't seem to work for me. They show on the screen but I can't hear them.
Also don't see how to enter dead notes. Popular notation for them is an X instead of an O.

Attachment Size
Time_Won't_Wait.mscz 18.77 KB

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 20:25

"Also don't see how to enter dead notes. Popular notation for them is an X instead of an O."
Dead notes: select the involved notes on your score -> double-click on the cross symbol in "Noteheads" palette.

"I could not figure out the ligattos and glissandos and slides.
They just don't seem to work for me. They show on the screen but I can't hear them."

Ligattos? You mean slurs maybe. It's in Lines palette (or S shorcut).
No particular effect with this currently.

Glissandos and slides? Well, without going into details, it's the same thing or the same idea but with different names. Slide, it may be closer to the idea of the guitar (electric, or bass, and also specific slides guitars, lap steal, dobro, etc.)

The glissandos are supported, in Glissandos & Arpeggio palette, but the reading is not suitable for the moment for the stringed instruments or winds, there neither, I do not enter in the details.
The sign is useful nevertheless. You can disable it's playback in Inspector (F8) and, if desired, replace in the same place the diminutive "gliss". by that of "Sl." for Slide.

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 22:04

Thanks. Another thing I can't find and I don't know what it is called as to try and look it up. My first bar in Time Won't Wait... So far I had managed to have two bars always fit the width of the page; but I added an arpegio symbol and the first bar expanded to the full width of the page, and even after removing the arpeggio symbol the bar did not compress again, so now the pagination no longer matches the music, because the first page has 3 bars instead of four. I looked in Edit, in Layout, in Style... In Layout there's two items calle Increase/Decrease layout stretch, but they don't seem to do anything...
Is there a way to tell MS to always fit 2 bars to the page come what may?

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 22:19

Adding line or page breaks works just like they do in a word processor - it helps if you want to fit less on line or page. But if you want to force more on a line, you need to make things smaller - either the content itself (eg, staff / font size) or the spaces between thing (layout stretch / character spacing). The layout stretch does do something to the selected measures in MuseScore, but it does it in small doses, so sometimes you need several clicks before it has enough of an effect to actually change how many measures fit on the line.

Note that "matching the music" (assuming you mean, reproducing the same layout as some printed version) is not normally a necessity or even particularly desirable, and more than it would be if you were re-typing a book and were expecting every line and page to end the same place. Each font is different, page sizes vary, etc, so normally it is best to let the software take care of those decisions.

But if you do have some special need to reproduce a particular layout and are having trouble, feel free to start a new thread and attach the score you are having difficulty with. I tried with the score you attached earlier, and adding an arpeggio did indeed cause the first measure to no longer fit, but removing it caused it to fit again, as did selecting the measure and reducing stretch just one notch.

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 22:38

:-). In the example posted, the issue appears to be a passage that was just slightly too wide to fit two measures on a line, so neither adding nor removing system breaks would help - only decreasing layout stretch or otherwise making things smaller.

It is true, though, that if one simply decided to live with that first measure being alone, removing the subsequent line breaks would help the rest of the music fit two measures per line (or more, or less, as actually appropriate to the music).

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• Aug 20, 2018 - 22:58

"Line" is a vague term that could mean many different things - a staff has five lines, also pedal markings are line, etc. "System break" is the more precise term for what one might colloquially think of as a line break. And until recently, it's what we called them in MuseScore, and I tend to be lazy and call them line breaks still, when I'm not being extra-careful.

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