Scoring of chords
I have signed a development agreement with musescore. What I would like to have in the software is the ability to add a chord staff to the music simply by entering and using the current chord name functionality. Interest let me and the musescore development staff know. Like wise if I generate the chord staff myself I wold like musescore to as an option display the appropriate chord names.
Interested let me and the staff at musescore know.
Carl
Comments
You mean entering a chordname would enter notes in the staff and entering notes in the staff would automagically create a chordname?
In reply to You mean entering a chordname by [DELETED] 5
If so, the voicings from chords.xml could be used, I guess
I don't see how this would work.
How are you going to assign an octave to a chord?
There is also the matter of inversion?
Conventional chord names do not specify the chord's inversion, which is extremely relevant to accompanimental chord progressions played on keyboard instruments.
If you can make it work then go for it :)
In reply to I don't see how this would by ChurchOrganist
It's a way bigger problem than that. There is also the issue of what rhythms to use, appropriate voicings for non-trivial chords (eg, chords with more than four notes). Not to mention what instrument(s) to use. This is really getting into the area of automatically generating accompaniment. There are existing tools that do this already. Better to simply integrate them better with MuseScore.
The first question to be asked is how much effort is needed to place notes on a staff to produce a chord today? The second is would you use an easier method if it existed. Last do you, or any musicians or composers you know, not know standard chord naming conventions?
I have only used MuseScore for less than a week. Yet within the first two days with no training I generated a full score 32 measures with repeats and coda. When I had everything in a mode I thought was perfect I generated a wav file to see how it sounded. Found a few minor mistakes that I did not hear when I played it on my PC. Unfortunately on my first attempt I used Chord names. Nice, easy but I could not play them with my score.
I am not an expert but in the case of scoring music it seems hearing is believing and the quickest way to check your efforts. As to special chords and inversions, etc. If the chord name is known and the chord is standard this is simply the matter of another button in the GUI and potentially flags of annotations on the chord name.
I absolutely agree chord names do not reflect octave. However once the score is generated from the name, It should be possible to change octaves for the actual score by drag-drop or Cntl keys as is done now. Likewise changing (adding or deleted a note in a chord should modify the chord name.
As to rhythms, instruments, etc. I don't know that I would initially take this that far. We may need to limit this to what MuseScore can currently produce and handle.
In reply to In reply to all and how chord annotation would work. by Carl M Jacobson
See my reply above. This is a tremendously complicated problem to solve, but luckily, a number of other programs have already solved it. Look at Impro-Visor, for example, if you want a free / open source solution. iReal Pro is very popular among iOS / Android apps, and Band-in-a-Box for Windows/Mac. There are a few others too. As I said, some day it would be nice to integrate one of these into MuseScore' to help automate the process of using them. But building this functionality into MuseScore directly is extremely unlikely. It's way too complex a problem that is outside the scope of what MuseScore is about.