Why can't I modify the entire position of my score (forgot pickup measure?)
I recently started trying to use musescore, as I'm not very literate when it comes to sheet music, being mostly self taught, so I'm taking my hand-scrawled stuff and converting it. I'm not having much luck, unless I get it *just* right the first time.
Basically, I forgot to place the first two notes into a pickup measure, and this caused some funky ties and and unnecessary complexity further on down the line (this is a swing piece in 4/4). Is there a way to put these two notes in the first measure and make everything else essentially scoot backwards a bit? Here's an image of what I'm looking at - I was about to start on the second section and start putting in some chords on this lead sheet, but I just gave up. Writing/scanning seems so much easier right now. I must be missing something, because I can't imagine everyone using this gets everything perfect the first time. That's not how composition works.
Thanks in advance, guys.
- Jimmy
Comments
The answer to the "why" is not really helpful. You just can't and it's not the way music works. Your composition is nice, but the rythm is quite off so even if you could the result would not be usable.
I rewrote it from scratch. It took me less than 5 minutes. See file attached
In reply to The answer to the "why" is by [DELETED] 5
Holy crap. I have no idea what I'm doing if you can do that in 5 minutes. Like I said, I could play this song in my sleep, but I'm terrible at notating and I'm really green to it.
Why wouldn't my question make sense, assuming you knew the implications of such a function? If I had added an extra few notes into something, and realized later on that it was messing up the melody's position relative to the changes, wouldn't it be better for me to be able to delete those notes and correct for it, rather than having to replace them with rests, as musescore is trying to make me do? It seems really unproductive from a compositional standpoint to have to repeatedly start from scratch if I don't like what I did in a specific spot. I'm not sure I'm phrasing my question correctly.
Did you just space the measures out? Basically, this is just an ABAB tune that I need to make a few lead sheets of.. I'm playing with some new musicians in a few days and I wanted to add this to the repertoire.
I don't think lasconic means that your question doesn't make sense, rather that he fears that his answer will appear unsatisfactory. MuseScore doesn't make the rules; it helps facilitate conversion of played music into a commonly accepted format (western written music) that can be used by others seeking to perform that music. Anyway, he missed out the chords (which took another 3 minutes or so). You appear to have a good ear for the pitch of notes, you just need to practice getting to grips with using MuseScore to get it down in orthodox format and I'm sure you'll love it. How fast could any of us write sentences the first time we tried it?
But to answer your question more gemerally, sure, you can move your entire compositon over by two beats. Just select all, cut, then them click the place you want to move it to, paste. All moving in MuseScore is done via cut and paste. In your case, you'd first need to insert a pickup measure. But as mentioned, you might not really like the results on this particular score, as a number of the rhythms are probably "off" a bit with regard to how they are normally supposed to be notated.
In reply to But to answer your question by Marc Sabatella
Okay, I think I've made a decent lead sheet using underquark's as a template. Technically, that triplet should be three dotted eighths, but that would be 2 & 1/4 beats if I'm not mistaken, and would cause it to look more confusing... most jazz musicians will know not to play it perfectly straight as the lead sheet shows it anyway.
At any rate, how does this look? I didn't want to put the actual chords in because I thought it would look confusing with the melody. I also can't find the delta '∆' symbol for major 7th chords anywhere.
In reply to Okay, I think I've made a by guitarman63mm
See the Handbook entry for Chord name for more on entering chord symbols. You have a choice of chord name styles, but you have to enter your chords according to the style you have selected, otherwise lots of bad thngs happen - like you won't et real flat or sharp signs, they won't transpose, etc. Looks like you would probably prefer the "cchords_sym" style, so start by selectong that as explaoned on the Handbook Then, you cam enter the triangle by typing "ma". And the half dimonished symbol by typing "mi7b5". MuseScore will automaitcally turn ipthese into the desired symbols.but do note in this symbol, you will need to enter monor chords as "-”. There is no predefined style that uses triangle for major but also uses "m" for monor. You can always customize the style file if you really need that.
However, since you are are apparently new at this, I'd suggest that rather than do any of this, you simply learn to enter symbols the "standard" way. Not that thee is only one standard, but most jazz publishers are moving to using "ma" for major, "mi" for minor, and "mi7b5" for half-diminished, and that is why the default chord name style for the Jazz lead Sheet template (cchords_muse) uses those abbreviations. Triangles for major in particular are definitely out - hardly any legitimate publisher uses those any more.
So aside from the chord issues, the only other obvious problem I see is that you have first and second endings but no repeats. That doesnt make sense.