Transpose only certain notes (octave jump)

• Oct 17, 2019 - 02:41

Hey,

Is there a way to select a certain range and let Musescore transpose (octave jump) all notes outside of that range to fit it in the selected range?

Example:
Range is set to C3-C5
- A2 will be transposed to A3
- D6 will be transposed to D4

Maybe there is a quick workaround that I didn't think of. Hopefully somebody has a solution.

Thanks in advance!


Comments

If I understand the question, you want all notes to be moved up or down to be between C3 and C5 (as an example). This means some notes will move up 1 or more octaves, while others will move down. If this is correct, then that is not feature and I, personally, haven't seen it requested before.

In reply to by jmjm

Workarounds are not straight forward. Perhaps you could use the split staff option twice (right click the staff and choose split staff). Using your example, use the first to move everything at C5 and below to the staff that will be created under the existing staff, then select that staff and move everything below C3 to the new staff that would be under the other new staff. This now gives you a staff with note above, a staff with notes in and a staff with notes under your range. You can move those notes above down into the range and those below up to the range, both using ctrl+arrow keys. Once all of the notes are in the correct range, you can select the 3 staves and use implode. This will put the notes in the top staff in various voices. Select the top staff and use implode as many times as necessary to put them all back into voice 1. You can then press i to open the instruments dialog and remove the unneeded staves.

I can't think of any easier workaround.

In reply to by jmjm

I think it might be more useful than you think. For example, someone yesterday wanted to enter Bari Sax music so they could press one button and have Bass Clarinet music. The problem is that the Bari Sax plays lower than the bass clarinet, so this plugin would be useful to automatically put the bottom notes up an octave into the Bass Clarinet range. Human intervention cannot be ignored, it might make sense to move some surrounding notes as well to prevent large jumps.

In reply to by jmjm

It's not common enough to justify building a command into MuseScore, but it actually is the sort of thing just useful enough to be worth a plugin (I could potentially have been faced with a similar issue right now trying to convert a trombone part into an alto sax part, but I got lucky - there is only one note out of bounds).

The plugin could even have some smarts where it looks at the surrounding context to decide if it makes sense to also transpose some surrounding notes - like, if the note is approached/followed by step but there is a leap within X notes before/after, transpose everything between the leaps, so you don't create any new leaps.

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