How Do I DELETE A NOTE???

• Nov 7, 2013 - 19:05

I am new to this program and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to go back into my score and delete a note I no longer want. I have tried higlighting the note and pressing "delete" but nothing happens. I understand the "back" function which takes you a step back, however it is counter productive to have to erase everything you've done all the way back to where you need to make a change. I must be missing something somewhere! Please help. This is driving me crazy!

Comments

• Nov 7, 2013 - 19:14

'Del' does delete the selected note and replaces it with a rest. That in turn can only get delete if not in voice 1if this doesn't work for you, please tell us which version and OS you are using and attach the score your having the problem with here.

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• Nov 7, 2013 - 20:42

I have a mac and am using OS 10.7.5

I am using Musescore version 1.3

I finally figured out that I can remove notes by using "command+x". Delete still does not work unless the note I am trying to remove is the last note I entered. Delete only seems to work as "step back" in the order entries were made. I cannot go back into a different part of the score, highlight a note and then delete it with the delete key (only "command+X" seems to work). This must be a mac thing I'm guessing.

I now have another newbie problem though... ;) I will try to explain but I'm not sure I know the right terminology to make this very clear. I have attached the score I am transposing so you can refer to it and maybe see what I'm trying to get at...

What I am trying to do is put 2 half notes below the whole note in measure 8 (treble cleft). Right now there is a whole note on G. I need to add a half note on middle C, followed by another half not on Bb to resolve the cord. However, whenever I try to add these notes they automatically jump into the next measure. Any suggestions would be appreciate!

Attachment Size
We Have This Hope.mscz 2.84 KB

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• Nov 7, 2013 - 19:16

It may be that you have managed to place more than one occurrence of a note in the same place. Selecting a note and pressing delete does work.

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• Nov 7, 2013 - 20:21

I believe it's Fn+Delete.

That's because most systems have separate Backsapce and Delete keys that do different things, but Apple for whatever reason decided their keyboard didn't need to have both. So they only included a backsapce key, and for good measure decided to mislabel it "Delete". That is, in most Mac programs (eg, anything dealing with editing text), the key labelled Delete actually performs the operation other operating systems would call "backspace" - delete character to *left* of cursor, move cursor backwards on place. What most systems call "delete" is deleting the character to the *right* of the cursor, leaving the cursor where it is. And most Mac programs do this by Fn+Delete.

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• Aug 14, 2015 - 19:22

I am having the same problem, with windows 7. There is no way I can change things. I am a novice. I try to delete and it puts in a rest or the other symbols, don't know what it is called. Please make it easy and just let us delete something we did wrong. People do make mistakes and need to delete!!! the del with x does work for some thing but not these. HELP!!!! So far I give your software a 0 out of 10. Make it simple not for pros!!!

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• Aug 14, 2015 - 19:53

As with any software, it does take a minute to get the hang of it, but MuseScore absolutely *does* let you make corrections, extremely simply. You don't even need to delete notes at all - just the type the new notes directly over the old, and they are replaced, no need to first delete anything.

If you added a note by mistake and then added more notes, those other ntoes are now too late in time - they are on the wrong beats. So if you want to move them earlier, you simply need to do that - select them, Ctrl_X to cut, then click where you want to move them to, Ctrl+V to paste. Same way you'd move notes later. Same whether you want to move the notes one beat earlier/later or 42 measures earlier/later.

If you are still having problems, please post the specific score you are having problems with and describe precisely what you are trying to do, and someone will be able to show you how to do it!

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• Aug 15, 2015 - 17:37

Again this software is junk. Now it will not let me do anything, all I can do is cut I cannot add anything to the current song. I need to ad notes to finish the song. Please fix this software or I will start letting everyone how bad it is. Make it so you can simply add remove or delete any thing any time you want. JUNK!!!

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• Aug 15, 2015 - 18:52

Sorry to hear you are finding it hard at first, but I assure you, it is not junk - like any sophisticated piece of software, you just need to learn to use it. As I said before, feel free to post the specific score you are having problems with and a precise description of what you are trying to do, and people will happy to help.

To add measures to a score. see Add / Measures. To delete notes, use Delete. To move subsequent notes earlier in time, use cut & paste as I described earlier. If you remove a note, MsueScore has no way of knowing if you want to also move the subsequent notes earlier in time, and even if it knew that you did, it would have guessing *how many notes* you want to mvoe. That is why you do this via cut and paste, so you are in control over whether subsequent notes move earlier, and how many notes get moved if so.

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• Aug 19, 2015 - 16:13

*sigh*

I wonder how I and eight million other people have been able to work with MuseScore all these years and create scores like this without the basic ability to delete a note? Oh, right, I guess that means it must be possible to delete a note after all.

So, here's a 100% sincere attempt to help—but I have a strong guess you're not going to be interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ4kRzkHroU&index=1&list=PLTYuWi2LmaPGb…

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• Oct 11, 2018 - 01:10

I also work on Windows 7, and I haven't found a way to delete a note, unless it is the last one of the score. However I can replace this note (or rest) with as many notes that I want by cutting them and then having them replace the note I want to get ride of: click on the first note to shift left; locate the last note to shift left, hold the shift key and click on that note, the whole series should now be highlighted; cut this series (ctrl X or use the Edit menu): if the last note of this series is not the last one of the score, nothing will disappear; then select the note or rest to be deleted, and paste (ctrl V or use edit menu). This will achieve what you are trying to do.

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• Oct 11, 2018 - 07:03

To delete a note simply select it and press Del. Then it will get replaced with a rest.
To delete a rest, select it and press Del, this works for all rests that are not in voice 1, rests in voice 1 will be bade invisible instead.
Music is noise or silence, removing noise (note) replaces it with silence (rest).
MuseScore does not have an insert mode, like you might know it from a text editing program.

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• Oct 13, 2018 - 21:43

Starting in version 2.3 (or maybe versio 2.2) deleting a rest in voice 1 made it invisible rather than the nothing that happened in earlier versions. You still cannot delete a rest and the silence remains there. If you want to move the notes after the rest into its position you must cut and paste those notes.

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• Mar 30, 2018 - 23:31

If you hit the keyboard icon at the top of the screen it brings up some options at the bottom. There is a delete one and if you click on the note and then hit delete it works. I've been struggling with it for a little bit and so glad I figured it out. (I have a Windows so if this doesn't work for anything else I'm sorry.)

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• Apr 18, 2018 - 15:17

'Delete' does NOT work. ( I'm on a laptop on Linux )
Yes I've tried it when not in 'Note entry mode'
I've tried: del key / backspace / shift del / ctrl del / windows key+del / del on numeric keypad.
I can not delete a note or rest - makes using this 'simple' score edit program incredibly frustrating!!

And yes, my 'del' key is working perfectly okay to fix typos in this comment!!! (and the del on my numeric keypad works too! )
I can't believe people have been raising this question for over 6 years and still people struggle to do this most basic of things, 'delete' a note, the handbook is no help, just go the note-entry page in the handbook and search for 'delete' or 'remove' those words are not even there!!! the edit-mode page has the word 'delete' once only and it doesn't tell you how to do it, just that you can. Except in my experience, you can't!

Update - so 'del' seems to have started working now - almost - it's now turning the 'note' into a 'rest' which just means I have 'rest' I want to delete, but can't. How hard can it be to implement a 'delete' that actually 'removes' something? ( so maybe you can change the measure to 'red' so people know it's now not 'right' musically for the timing, so they can decide what they want to do about it, like adding a note somewhere else in the bar or adding a dot to note ). Simple not letting people delete things is a crazy and very non-intuitive way to do things ( especially with NO visual or audio feedback to let the user know it's not letting you do it on purpose and nothing in the handbook about it ).

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• Apr 18, 2018 - 15:45

Music is noise and silence, removing noise means replacing with silence, and exactly that happens when you delete a note (or rather the last note of a chord), I.e. it gera replaced by a rest.
If you want the following notes/rests to fill that gap, use copy/cut and paste, only you know upto where you want that to happen.

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• Apr 18, 2018 - 16:12

As mentioned, it is totally correct that deleting a note replaces it with silence. That is because if you didn't, this would not only leave the measure with too few beats, but it would also have the possibly unintended side effect of moving subsequent notes earlier in time, which is very often not what would be desired.

If this happens to be one of the cases where you actually do mean to move some number of subsequent notes earlier in time, that's easy too - just do it directly, using cut and paste. After all, only you know how many notes you want moved, so you need to tell MuseScore this by selecting them, cutting, and pasting to the new desired location. No need to delete anything at all, actually - just paste the subsequent note directly on top of the one you are thinking you need to delete.

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• Mar 20, 2019 - 15:23

I just had the exact same problem, only that sometimes it works as expected (selecting a note and hitting [delete] actually deletes the note and leaves a rest) and sometimes the same procedure deletes the last entered note irrespective of which note is marked.
The key for em was to toggle the note-input button at the very left second row right under the button for 'new score'.

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• Mar 20, 2019 - 22:45

Delete always removes whatever is selected. If you are in note input mode, there are two different cursors - one (just color highlighting of the note itself) telling you what is selected (generally, the most recently entered note), and another (a larger colored rectangle) telling you where the next note will be entered. Maybe that's where you got confused?

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