Simplifying all rests in a piece: is there an easy way?

• Oct 1, 2013 - 01:11

I scored out a few pieces with little regard for cleaning up the rest values while I was scoring. Now that I need to give scores for musicians to play, I'd like to make the pieces easier to read by combining all the adjacent smaller-valued rests in bars.

A basic example:

| Qnote Qnote 8rest 8rest Qnote |

which should be

| Qnote Qnote Qrest Qnote |

Is there an easy way to automate this process? It would take me hours to combine all these rest values by pointing and clicking for all the instruments and for all these pieces.

Thanks!


Comments

Generally, you're better off cgetting rests right as you go, unfortunately. Are there really that many incorrect rests? Usually they would result only from certain types of edits. But in any case, you can certainly do better than clicking for each of them. If you haven't been using keyboard input but have been doing everything by clicking, now would be a fine time to learn. See Note entry , and also watch the tutorial videos on the main page of this site. Cursor keys and numbers - that's all you need. Still will take a while, but will be faster than literally clicking everything.

There is a way to do this if you only have one Voice:

Select everything in the stave that you wish to clean up.
Edit -> Voice -> Exchange Voice 1-2.
Right-click on a rest and Select -> All similar elements.
Press [Del].
Select everything in the stave again.
Edit -> Voice -> Exchange Voice 1-2.
Right-click on a rest and Select -> All similar elements.
Press [Del].

In reply to by underquark

There is an easier way.

1) select the first rest

2) Go up to the 'note' tool bar - The eighth note will be dark as will the rest button

3) Click on the Quarter note button

The 2 eighth rests will be collapsed into a quarter rest. This seems to work for any collection of sequential rests, as long as the note value you select is less than or equal to the total rest time.

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