Guide to Tuplets Against 5 (3:5, 7:5, 9:5, 4:5 and so on)

• Jan 6, 2018 - 15:43

As far as I know the Musescore handbook does not have any guide to this nor any intuitive way to do this.

Say you have the following measure of music:

image1.png

and for the last portion you wish to have a triplet take up the entire space of the rests. In Musescore it initially seems that you are unable to do this; creating any kind of tuplet highlighting the rests in any order only establishes two separate tuplets, not one tuplet lasting that entire period of time. Furthermore, the "other tuplet" input still fails as it does not allow you to select more than one note or rest:

image2.png

So one might be led to believe that one cannot create a tuplet of this length. However, this is incorrect; the solution for this simply is more roundabout than should be necessary. One must create a measure of 5/X, where X is subdivision of course. Doing this gives you measures of whatever it is -- in our example, measures of 5/16 -- however the rests in these measures are marked as a whole rest, rather than 5 sixteenth notes. This, as far as I am aware, is the only way to create a tuplet against 5. Therefore, say I want the notes in my 3:5 tuplet at the end of our measure to be, in order, D5 C5 Ab4, then I would end up with the following in the 5/16 bar:

image3.png

From here I can simply copy/paste that bit into where I need it to be, and now I have my 3:5 tuplet:

image4.png

Hopefully this helps whoever needs it. I only found one forum post from almost exactly a year ago asking how to create a 12:5 tuplet ( https://musescore.org/en/node/166191 ). The general idea however should be useful to at least some people.

Hopefully in the future there is an intuitive way to do this.


Comments

Excellent! Thanks so much for this it is exactly what I was looking for. My issue was with inputting this measure. I had to break it into three measures and then combine them, I was going crazy trying to figure it out, for over an hour before I found your post. Thanks again!
4-5-tuplet.JPG

Say I wrote a triplet within a half rest, is there a way to only keep that first beat of the triplet and cut and discard the other 2 beats?

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