Can Musescore do a chord letter over a chord letter (inversions) in chord symbols?

• Dec 7, 2016 - 07:54

Is there a standard way to get something like

Selection_001.png

for a chord inversion rather than the horizontal F/A for chord symbols using the Chord text (Ctrl+K)?
Thanks for any response

So far as a workaround there are the options of using a different Text type and underlining the top letter, then a new-line followed with the bottom letter. Another option is to use an actual line from the palette.


Comments

Inversions in chord symbols are much more commonly indicated using a diagonal forward slash (rather than a horizontal line) because horizontal lines are usually reserved for indicating polychords (one chord over another chord). IMHO, this convention is useful because it reduces confusion.

Nonetheless, to answer your question, it is possible (though not particularly straightforward) to do this in MuseScore. Below is a short extract from one of my teaching handouts which shows how I created a horizontal line to indicate polychords (for speed, you could just copy and paste).

Attachment Size
Slash Chords extract.mscz 11.59 KB

In reply to by mike320

It's just three chord symbols assigned to the same note and placed one above the other (using vertical shift): the middle chord symbol is just four underscores. Depending on the font, it's not necessarily perfect though - with the MuseJazz font, for example (as in my file), if you zoom in you'll see small gaps between each of the underscore lines. Definitely a "cheap 'n' cheerful" hack.

If you have some special reason to consistently want to indicate ordinary slash chords that way, you could create a custom chord description and use it via Style / General / Chord Symbols, although it's not trivial to get this working. If you just need to demonstrate this for some particular purpose quickly, I'd just enter the two chords, position them manually or via text styles set to different vertical offsets, and add a horizontal line as text or from the Symbols palette. There would have to be a pretty special reason for me to want to go to all this trouble rather than use the standard diagonal slash, though.

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