Shared noteheads: allowed or forbidden?

• Jun 7, 2019 - 11:07

As a starting point, we can all probably agree that the primary purpose of MuseScore is beautiful notation? Playback is a secondary consideration.

So it's frustrating that even MS 3.1 seems to insist on enforcing a rule which results in ugly layout. This occurs when two voices in the same stave share a unison notehead - but the voices have different duration. This example as shown in the piano treble clef stave below is from the original 1899 edition of Debussy's Le Tombeau des Naïades:
Debussy_Le_Tombeau_original_edition.png

But MuseScore doesn't seem to allow the sharing of a unison notehead where one voice is dotted but the other is not. This results in uneven and ugly spacing of notes under the beam:
Debussy_Le_Tombeau_MuseScore_3.1.png

See how MuseScore's rule even has a negative knock-on effect on the spacing of the triplets in the Voice stave.

I checked in Elaine Gould's book Behind Bars, where she clearly states that shared noteheads are allowed in this circumstance. From page 307:
Shared noteheads in unison
It is an accepted keyboard (and harp) convention that notes of unequal duration may share a notehead in the context of repeated patterns.
[...] A dotted note and a note without a dot may share a dotted notehead.

And precisely because a work like this does use repeated patterns, the amount of manual adjustment needed to make the layout acceptable for publication is prohibitive. Is this worth raising in the Issue Tracker, or am I missing a really easy solution which I'm not aware of?


Comments

In reply to by geetar

@geetar Thank you!
Indeed, changing the Head Type of each leading semiquaver in Voice 1 from "Auto" to "Crotchet" fixes the problem. After fixing:
Debussy_Le_Tombeau_MuseScore_3.1_shared_noteheads.png

And my apologies for saying bad things about MuseScore 3.1 - must read the handbook more carefully... ;-)

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.