Saxophone Doubling/Transposition changes for Big Bamd

• Dec 3, 2012 - 18:12

Hello,
I'm writing a big band chart for a band I play in, and I'd like to have the tenor saxophone double on flute. How would I go about changing the transposition of the part in the middle of the score, and then changing back once It is finished? Thanks.
I'm using Musescore 1.2 Revision 5470


Comments

Unfortunately, MuseScore does support this directly. I know of two options, neither of them great:

1) Don't worry about playback, and simply enter the notes for flute while concert pitch pitch is turned off. It will display correctly, but still sound like tenor saxophone and play a ninth too low (and thus sound terrible). If you really need playback to come out right, you could set these notes to have 0 velocity (via note properties) but add another staff for playback, that you'd remove for printing. Or have the printed score be a "part" you generate from the full score., containing all but the flite staff.

2) Create separate staves for tenor sax and flute, so the score will show them as separate, but then have the generated part contain both staves. Use the Hide Empty Staves feature in the part so you don't actually both parts. This will require you to make sure part changes happen at line breaks, and you'll probably need to force courtesy key signatures to appear by having the tenor part change keys right at the spot where the flute enters. Up to you whether you want to mess with Hide Empty Staves for the score or let it be two staves. If you turn on Hide Empty Staves for the score, you may want to take steps to make sure *other* empty staves *don't* get hidden (ie, plant invisible silent notes on them).

MuseScore 2.0 has a feature where you can change sound in mid-score, but unfortunately, it doesn't allow for transposition changes. To my thinking, this idea of being able to identify regions of a score to receive different treatment (different transposition is but one application of this idea) is probably the single biggest area of improvement I think 2.0 should tackle.

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