Force all stems up

• May 27, 2016 - 05:32

Is there a way to make all stems in a particular staff (or whole score) point up? I seem to remember being able to do that in 1.3, but I can't find anything in the staff properties panel to say that all notes should have a stem direction of "up". Is there still an easy way to do this in the 2.0.x series?


Comments

In reply to by duck57

There is a difference between selection a *range* and selecting *notes*. A range can also include rests, and of course, dynamic markings and tons of other things. So be sure to have only the notes selected if you wish to use controls that only apply to notes. One easy way to do this is to select the range then press the Notes button in the Inspector.

BTW, stems are automatically forced up in voice 1 if you have have notes entered into any other voice. That's normally the only situation where you'd want to have all stems forced up anyhow. But fi you some special reaosn to want stems up even though there are not multiple voices involved, the Inspector is indeed the way to do it.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I think the cause is from the bug about trying to select notes in your range also selecting the grace notes, which confuses the Inspector (see the other chain).

The use case for setting stem direction at the staff-level is that some marching percussion ensembles prefer all their stems to point up for their battery percussion, so whether you select the notes and flip the stems or set it as a staff setting really just is a workflow choice. The benefit to setting it at the staff level is that new notes will not need to be manually selected and flipped.

IIRC, the main reasons why they prefer all stems to point up is that it:

  1. Makes the rhythms more obvious (or at least more consistent in their notation)
  2. Consistency between snare drums & cymbals (which have the vast majority of their notes on one line) and bass & tenor drums (which have 4–6 drums from which to choose).
  3. Beams above, stickings (usually marked with whatever software's lyrics tool) below

In reply to by Isaac Weiss

They are. I think my issue is from opening an old score from 1.3 with outdated instrument definitions (or maybe just converted from MusicXML from even older Finale files). Perhaps I should just re-enter all the notes with a modern template (since it's fairly short), rather than keep messing with the current files until they look nice.

(I've got a ton of old music floating around in various formats that I need to convert into MuseScore)

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