Consolidating four piano staves into two
I recently downloaded the attached MIDI file. When I imported it into MuseScore, it showed four piano staves. Not having had much experience with MuseScore, I'd appreciate some guidance as to how to consolidate these four lines into a two-line piano score, then add the requisite lyrics. Thanks in advance!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Now_Thank_We_All_Our_God_MIDI.mscz | 25.29 KB |
Comments
See: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/tools#implode
Or use Voices https://musescore.org/en/handbook/voices with https://musescore.org/en/handbook/copy-and-paste#selection-filter
Then delete the needless stave
and: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/lyrics
attached example
With practice what you are asking for is easy, but takes a little bit of planning. In the measures where the 2 staffs have the same clef you need to identify which measures have identical rhythms. It's quite easy in this piece. You can click the first note of the first measure of the first staff and the last note of the last measure of the second staff where this is the case. You will have measures on both staffs selected. Then click Edit|Tools|Implode. All the notes will appear on the first staff but also remain on the second. You can do this one measure at a time or as many as you want, but it must be whole measures.
Once those are done you need to select the measures on the second staff where the rhythm is different and click Edit|Tools|Voices|Exchange 1-2. Then press F6 if the selection tool window is not visible. Uncheck Voice 1 and ensure all of the voice 2 notes are selected in the measure you are working on. They will be green. Copy (or cut) the measure and paste it into the other staff with the same clef. As before, you can do this one measure at a time or several measures in a row, but they must be complete measures.
You now have a treble clef staff that is how you want it and a bass clef staff how you want it. At this point you have 2 choices. Either make a new score with just 1 piano grand staff or add another piano to the instruments (pressing I brings up the instruments dialog box). If you have tempo changes, key changes, rehearsal marks and other things that you want on you score I would definitely chose the second option because they will be retained after the next few steps. If you have no additional markings then a new score will be just as easy.
You will have to decide which clef you want in measures such as 8 and 9 since you cannot have both on a single staff.
To finish, click the first note of the treble staff and press ctrl-shift-end to select to the end of the staff. Copy this and paste it into the new piano part you created. Do the same with the bass clef part. If you added an instrument to the existing score then you can delete the 2 existing piano parts by pressing I and removing them.
Since you are importing a Midi file I feel that the new score route would be the better, safer, option. I would not use the new score if there are tempo changes. If there are key changes you will have to go back and reenter the key changes in a new score.