Link 2 staves to 1 or vice versa or mix Voices?

• Sep 18, 2016 - 14:47

Is there a way to have the notation changes in two staves followed by the notation in another staff linked in common to both. My example is 4-part a cappella voice (TTBB) for which I need separate instruments (staves) to provide part-dominant mixes for learning tracks but the score for distribution needs two staves with two parts each.

The reverse would also work - having Voice 1 in the 2-part staff followed by a single voice staff and Voice 2 followed by another staff.

And this would also work for me - being able to independently mix the Voices in a common staff.

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• Sep 18, 2016 - 18:29

Currently, the way to do this is to use the Inspector to lower the velocity of notes in one voice - right click a note, Select / More / Same voice, then put a negative offset into the velocity field in the Inspector.

In future versions of MuseScore, there may be new options to do this sort of thing more directly.

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• Sep 18, 2016 - 22:40

Thanks for responding Marc. I don't see how that responds to my question. No additional channels are shown on the mixer nor do I see how it affects linked staves - one mirrors the other.

That did make me look a little more closely at linked staves and I did come up with a way to show 2 parts (say T1 and T2) in 1 staff and just T1 in one linked staff and just T2 in the other linked staff by making Voice 2 invisible in one and Voice 2 invisible in the other. But I cannot make the secondary staves invisible because the control of staff visibility is in the Instrument affecting all its linked staves. Nor can I give each linked staff its own name and the mixer has only one channel for all three.

So no joy so far...

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• Sep 19, 2016 - 01:33

What I am saying is, don't use additional staves at all, and don't use the Mixer. Just have your score the way you want it "for real" - two voices combined on one staff - and use the Inspectir, not the Mixer, to control relative volume of those two voices. It works fine, just a few extra steps.

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• Sep 19, 2016 - 03:42

Okay, I get it. It doesn't meet all my objectives and is cumbersome and non-intuitive. What we want is to elevate and pan to the left the voice that we want to make dominant for one learning track, diminish and pan to the right the other three voices and export the mix to audio. Do the same thing for each of the four voices.

With your workaround of the limitations, one can elevate one voice and diminish the other three but the staff pair of voices in which the dominant part resides both get panned to the left and the other staff pair of voices to the right. It's a compromise but does avoid the issue of keeping the notation of the visible, silent staves in sync with the invisible, audible staves that I have using my current technique.

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• Sep 18, 2016 - 22:51

Thanks for the links, Jojo. So the terminology is:
Implode: combine notes from multiple staves to a common staff
Explode: split Voices from a selected staff to individual staves, one for each original Voice

From what I quickly read, the current development of Explode destroys the original multi-voice staff whereas I would want to preserve it. Likewise, I would want to preserve the original staves using Implode. Also, the development appears to be gearing for one implode or one explode in a system - I would want two.

In any case, it sounds encouraging.

Is there anybody working on mapping voices to Mixer channels or sub-channels, e.g., a voice pre-mixer for an Instrument with independent gain, pan on each voice?

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• Sep 19, 2016 - 10:09

You should try a development version to see if it's going in the right direction. See https://musescore.org/en/download#Nightly-versions

For now, in development version one can

1/ Mute a single voice from an instrument in the Mixer
2/ Create parts with a single voice. So a score with SA-TB (closed score) and 4 linked parts S, A, T, B is now possible. Also a score with SA-TB and a part with SATB (open score) is also possible.

Score attached SATB.mscz

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• Sep 19, 2016 - 16:00

Thanks, Iasconic! That does what I want, I think. I don't see how it is setup to do it, though. As neither a musician nor high on the MuseScore learning curve, I don't know all the terminology. What part(s) ;-) of the Handbook should I be checking? I see how File>Part is used to make filtered views of the whole score but I don't see how a Voice gets mapped to an Instrument independent of another Voice on the same staff.

EDIT: oops, I went to the link shown below the score which was done by Nicolas in 2.0.3 and that was the basis for my comment above. Then I downloaded SATB.mscz and 2.0.3 wouldn't open it. I have yet to try out the latest build but I am already somewhat out of my depth!

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• Sep 22, 2016 - 03:29

I tried c57187a and see your

1/ Mute a single voice from an instrument in the Mixer
and
2/ Create parts with a single voice. Your SATB.mscz opened without crashing; that's awesome the way you can slice and combine the display of voices and sync the notation.

Re #1, I wonder if that development is heading in the direction of independent Volume and Pan for Voices or if that is even possible. I don't know Midi well enough and I assume that you would seek to maintain compatibility with it.

I played with your Barbershop Voice Mixing hack and apart from labelling, it gives the desired Vol/Pan control over the parts, if I am using the right terminology. Am I right that it is still necessary to edit the mscx file? I did not see a way to do it in the Nightly.

I edited the mscx file to change the Instrument and voice names and used the Parts configurator to create a 4-staff TTBB "part". There was a glitch with Treble8vb losing the 8vb on the second staff of the TTBB part and brackets getting confused but I was able to fix those and it appears to be quite usable. Given that the mscx "hack" gives me the desired Vol/Pan control over each voice, I don't think there is any point in using 1 voice per staff so one Treble8vb and one Bass staff with two voices each is all I would need. The Parts configurator is probably not of much value to such simple scores or, at least, to this simple-minded scribe.

So I will play some more with the mscx hack and see what trouble I may get into.

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