Chord layout
Is it possible to change Muse Score's default layout for chords? See the attached pic. The left chord shows how Muse Score displays the chord; the right chord shows how I would like it to display the chord. Is there any way to change it? Thanks in advance.
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Comments
You can nudge the noteheads in edit mode (i.e. after a double click) with the cursor keys
Click on any single notehead in that chord.
Press 'X'.
Regards.
In reply to Try this... by Jm6stringer
Ah, should have though of that, "flipping notehead to the other side of stem", even if that chord doesn't have a stem...
In reply to Try this... by Jm6stringer
Wow. That's two easy and great solutions. What fantastic people there are in this forum. I'm very grateful. Thank you.
Thanks so much for the speedy reply and for the solution I was looking for.
Sometimes MuseScore's defaults are incorrect and need to be overriden in the manner described. But for the record - this is not one of those cases. The MuseScore default here is correect; what you are trying to change it to is non-standard. The rule with whole notes is, imagine how it would work for stemmed notes, and align the note heads as if the stem were present. For this chord, if there were a stem, it would go down, and your arrangement would look very strange indeed in that case. As far as I know, this rule is universal - not one of those fuzzy rules where some editors do it one way and others do it another. But I could be wrong about that.
Anyhow, if you play with different arrangements of notes, you'll find that MuseScore follows that rule correctly. However, there are other situations where it does not - especially when multiple voices are involved. So you will definitely need this technique one way or another.
BTW, "X" doesn't flip the notehead to the other side of the stem - "Shift+X" does. "X" just flips the stem itself. But because the rules for whole notes are the same as for half notes, flipping even a non-existent stem has the same effect. Still, you can use Shift+X to move the bottom note to the other side of the non-existent stem.
In reply to Sometimes MuseScore's by Marc Sabatella
Thank you Marc for that important insight. I didn't really consider 'wrong' or 'right'. I'm trying to duplicate a 30-year old piano manuscript and the chords must be showing in a non-standard way in that because they have aligned the chords as per my 'after' shot, i.e. which is the non-standard way. Again, thanks for clarifying things.
In reply to Standard vs non-standard by robspratt
Well, if that's a manuscript from a legitimate publisher (as opposed to, say, the composer's own handwritten version or something) then I'd say it proves me wrong about the rule being universal...
In reply to Well, if that's a manuscript by Marc Sabatella
No, I'm sure you are right. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word manuscript. It's perhaps a bit grandiose and it may have confused things. I'm working on a 30-year old piano course and it's full of different scores and some of those scores show the 'flipped' layout for chords. I think it's very possible that they got it wrong, I really do. I have found lots of little mistakes throughout the course so I know that attention to detail wasn't the biggest priority when it was put together. For my own peace of mind, I'm going to let MuseScore make the decision for me about how it should be. I trust MuseScore more than I do the authors of the piano course :)
In reply to No, I'm sure you are right. by robspratt
FWIW, Finale and SIbelius both agree with MuseScore here.
But it's worth double checking, because as I said. MuseScore really gets a bunch of things wrong once multiple voices are involved.
In reply to FWIW, Finale and SIbelius by Marc Sabatella
I think a good rule of thumb is to look at the whole chord on both staves.
Normally one would align all the notes vertically with the F being to the left, although there are rare occasions when you would shift the F to the right for other formatting reasons.
If you used Shift+X to reverse the positions (as in the second chord) then the RH chord would align with the F not with the other 2 notes in the chord, which would be completely wrong.
HTH
Michael