I want a clef change in the score but not in the part
Hello, I found several similar questions to this but none that addressed this exact issue. I'm writing a big band chart and the default setting has tenor saxes transposing by an octave in the concert score and in a regular treble clef in the transposed part. In the concert score, I want to manually alternate between regular treble clef and bass clef, but when I insert these clefs in the score, they are carried through to the transposed part, generating copious ledger lines. Instead, I want the part to stay in regular treble clef regardless of what I do in the score. Can this be done?
Comments
Are you planning on keeping the concert score around? Normally that would just be for data entry, then you'd transpose it. In which case you'd just remove the unneeded clef changes. If you want to keep a concert score, my suggestion is make a copy of the score and put that in concert pitch. But if for whatever reason that's not a good option, you can take advantage of the fact that MuseScore manages clefs separately for concert and transposed, but it gets confused about doing this if the score and parts both exist and are in different states. So, best to do the work on the concert score before generating parts. if you've already generated parts, temporarily put the tenor parts in concert pitch. Now any clef changes you make will apply to both score and part but won't apply when you switch the part back to transposed. You'll just have extra clefs you can mark invisible.
In reply to Are you planning on keeping… by Marc Sabatella
Hello Marc,
Thanks for the reply. I do plan to keep the concert score around. I gave your suggestions a try, but unfortunately without success. Entering the clef changes before generating parts is what first produced the problem; MS put all of my in-line clef changes into the transposed part generated from the concert score.
It appears that against your prediction, MS is not managing the clefs for the concert and transposed scores separately. When I switch the tenor parts from transposed to concert and back, any clef changes I made in the concert score are carried through, regardless of whether I enter them in the score or the part (and they actually cause the notes to move in the expected way, so I can't simply mark them invisible). I tried all the combinations of having the score and parts in different states, too.
The only exception is that I am able to set clef for the entire staff of each part independently--indeed, this happens with the default settings, which have the tenor in an octave clef (regular treble clef when transposed) and the baritone sax in bass clef (treble clef when transposed). It's the in-line changes in clef that are causing problems.
So, for now, I'll create a separate file as a workaround and use it to generate my concert score. But it would be ideal to be able to work with only one file.
In reply to Hello Marc,… by underscoreStandard
I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. The existence of the clefs is going to be the same for concert versus transposed views. It's the actual clef used that is managed separately. So if you have a clef at measure 14, for example, that clef change will be there in both views - but it might be to bass clef in one view and treble clef in the other.
To see this, try the following:
1) new score for tenor sax
2) turn on Concert Pitch
3) add a bass clef before measure 6 (or wherever)
4) turn concert pitch off
You'll see the clef is there. But now:
5) change it to treble
6) turn concert pitch back off
Now you'll see it's still bass in the concert pitch view. So you have on clef in concert pitch mode, a different clef in transposed mode. Generate parts and you'll see it's the same way there - the transposed view will show treble clef, but it will still be bass clef if you turn concert pitch on. Of course, you don't need the treble clef in the transposed view since it's already treble clef, so you can hide it by selecting it and pressing "V". Set the "Leading space" to a negative value in the Inspector and you can reclaim the space it took, leaving no evidence of its presence.
This is a bit of work, though, so that's why I also suggested simply making a concert copy.
In reply to I think you are… by Marc Sabatella
Thanks for clarifying! I succeeded with this approach.
The trick was being very careful about what state the score and parts were in. To set the clefs for the concert score, I had to set the parts to concert, too, and then I had to switch both back to transposing to insert the invisible dummy treble clefs after.
I found this much easier than creating a new copy of the file, because then I have to update both files with any changes I make to the music. But I didn't bother with tweaking the leading space left by the invisible clefs, which would have taken substantially more time.