Working with chords in lead sheets
I'm brand new to musescore and am looking forward to working with it. My first project involves creating a jazz lead sheet. I went through the various tutorial (including the excellent two on lead sheets), but have a problem that I can't find a simple solution for. I'm entering a bar in 6/8 with two dotted quarter notes, each of which is associated with a new chord (with complex names, of course) . When I enter the chord names, they overlap and the note positions don't slide over to make room for the chords. BTW-The process I use is the select the first note I want, type cntrl-K and advance with the space bar. I would expect behavior like I see when entering lyrics where the notes adjust spacing to accomodate the lyrics. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
Al
Comments
You're doing nothing wrong, cords unfortunatly don't cause the notes to re-align.
You could stretch the bars as a workaround and submit this problem in the issue tracker.
Indeed, chords don't affect spacing, so you need to either add stretch to the measure or just drag the chords away from each other a bit, or some combination of the two.
Something to consider - one is often better off not over-specifying chord symbols. Not only to they present formatting issues like this, but they also tend to confuse the improvisor, who, if he was good enough to actually make effective use of all the extra info, is also probably good enough to choose reasonable alterations for himself. I'm not saying there are *never* reasons to use complex chord symbols in lead sheets, but to my mind, anything that goes beyond the bare minimum needed to suggest the scale(s) you have in mind is usually counterproductive. And it almost never takes more than a 7th with a single alteration to unique suggest a scale.