Dotted slurs; Timeless/Barless Music; Stemless Notes; Meunes

• Jul 17, 2009 - 14:49

First of all, let me say that I was very pleasantly surprised at the completeness and ease of use that MuseScore presents. I've used several other free (open source) notation programmes but they all had several major drawbacks. So far MuseScore hasn't presented a single major drawback and I'm very pleased with it. Kudos to the developers!

Now for my feature requests... I sing in a roman catholic church choir and my feature requests pertain to gospel music, gregorian chants and acclamations...

1) Dotted Slurs

Quite often in (gospel) music the lyrics of different couplets don't exaclty match up on eachother. In order to write them all under the same music notation, dotted slurs are needed to indicate notes that are sometimes slurred and sometimes not, depending on the syllables. Currently I use normal slurs which does just fine, but being able to write dotted slurs would be quite useful.

2) Timeless / Barless Music

Acclamations and gregorian chants don't use times or bars, but MuseScore forces me to choose a time...

3) Stemless Notes

Acclamations and gregorian chants are usually written using notes without stems, either plain notes (quarter notes without a stem) for short and open notes (whole notes) for long, or plain notes for short and plain notes with a dash over it for long.

4) Meunes

This is a really low low low low low priority feature request :) but if MuseScore could also write Meunes that would be really awesome. Meunes are a medieval form of musical notation using only four lines and very peculiar stemless notes (squares, diamonds, etc.) and is still sometimes used for the notation of gregorian chants.

It could be that some of these features already exist but I have just been too much of a newbie to figure them out... In that case I would appreciate a hint towards how to do it ;)


Comments

Stemless notes can be invoked by right-clicking on a bar, selecting measure properties and selecting stemless.

Alternate note shapes can be selected in the noteheads section of the pallettes.

For Meunes, can you give us a reference example (e.g. a picture of Meunes notation)?

From right-click->staff properties you can change the number of lines to 4. MuseScore has a limited notehead palette, but if you can give examples of what you are looking for, I'm sure someone can integrate it in the future.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

It's neumes. Got the n and the m switched around there.

I've found that in the note properties, one can also check a "staffless" checkbox which does the trick, but I have yet to find a way to do this for more than one note at a time...

Here's an example of a Kyrië Eleïson written in Neumes:

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