Notating piano duo. Making it playable. Pianist and Violinst input. Composers ask musicians.

• Jan 30, 2017 - 07:18

How do I eliminate the extra rests in this piano score? I am rather confused and if you could explain it step by step that would be great! Thank you so much! This is for a piano duo.

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• Jan 30, 2017 - 07:30

You can delete non-voice 1 rests: right-click one, Select>/More.../Same Voice/OK, Del
Or you can make them invisible, same procedure to select them, then instead of Del hit V

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• Jan 30, 2017 - 17:07

Unfortunately, this score contains a large number of errors in notation that will need to be corrected. For example, in the first measure, the whole note above the bass clef staff belongs in the treble clef. In measure 2, there should be only voice in the bottom staff. And so on. Simply hiding all the rests in any voice will *not* produce the correct - the error need to be corrected by moving notes to the correct voice or staff. Which, realistically, will often be easier done by simply re-entering those measures, although to some extent you can move notes between voices by selecting them and pressing the appropriate voice button (if the destination voice happens to be empty at that time position), or via copy and paste, etc.

I guess maybe this score came from MIDI import? That's not a very efficient method of input for music of any complexity, because MuseScore will often struggle to understand which notes are in which voices - MIDI doesn't have any way of communicating that. Anyhow, it will take quite a bit of work to correct all this, I'm afraid - there won't be a simple quick fix. In the future, you might find it more efficient to simple enter the music yourself in the first place.

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• Jan 30, 2017 - 19:39

It's not so much that it is *unplayable* - it's that it is not *notated* correctly, so it is largely *unreadable*. Unfortunately, MIDI just is not a good way to get a readable score - it was never designed for that purpose. So unfortunately, importing a MIDI file will often require a *lot* of work to get a readable score - more work than would be required to simply enter the music normally, in many cases.

That said, right from the very beginning there are playability issues as well. I am not sure how you created this MIDI file, but unless you have extremely large hands, the very first measure is not really playable as is, even not considering the notation issues. The D in the top staff needs to be played by the right hand, the E in the bottom staff needs to be played with the left hand - leaving no hands available to play the G & A, which are too far away from both the D and E to be played simultaneously. So I'm not sure how you managed to get that into your MIDI file, but it's something that needs to be fixed.

Bottom line, MIDI doesn't mean you don't have to know how to notate music correctly. There is no substitute for learning that skill. Then you can consider if there are cases where using MIDI might speed up entry of the music. But either way it will still be up to you to make sure the notation is correct - meaning that what you create is both playable and readable.

Basically, you want to normally want to organize things so that the notes to be played by the right hand are in the top staff, the notes to be played by the left hand in the bottom staff, and you only want to use multiple voices if you need one hand to play two different rhythms at the same time. Only you can know which notes are to be played by which hand - MIDI does not record that information - and unfortunately in this case there are just a lot of notes in the wrong staff, often in a second voice that wouldn't have been needed had ther note been entered onto the proper staff.

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