One Line Staves Acting Weird

• May 20, 2018 - 16:16

I've noticed that whenever I use percussion with one line, like the snare drum, everything is pushed lower than it should be. Why does this happen?


Comments

It sounds like the staff has been altered in the staff properties.

Line distance should be 1 sp,
Extra distance above staff should be 0
Scale should be 100%

Otherwise attach a score so we can see what's happening with it.

In reply to by GreenGuy5294

If you mean everything besides the notes, it is an anomaly in the program. that I think should probably be considered a bug. When you have a 1 line percussion staff, everything is displayed as though there is a 5 line staff and the notes are on the top line. I generally just deal with the annoyance of having to move every dynamic mark up 4 or 5 spaces. I haven't used many other items like the measure repeat, so I hadn't noticed them being displayed low.

I suggest you enter a bug report. If it's a deliberate feature, someone will change it a feature request. It's also possible that @Daniel is working on fixing this already and he should say as much if this is the case.

In reply to by GreenGuy5294

Unfortunately in MuseScore all distances are relative to the top line of the staff, so the default settings for elements like dynamics that go below the staff will indeed be too far below. In a score like this that only includes one-line staves, you could change the text style for dynamics. Otherwise, you can right-click one dynamic on this staff, Select / All Similar Elements on Same Staff, and use the Inspector to set a more appropriate vertical offset for that staff.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

MuseScore should take into account the number of lines on a staff. Perhaps only consider it when the staff is percussion or tablature so everything gets displayed correctly. If the offset number is positive, then subtract 1 space for every line missing or add 1 space for every extra line, mostly in the case of tablatures. The alternative would be to allow for styles that are applied only to tabs and pecussion different than pitched staves. This is one of the few notations that MuseScore does not make easy.

In reply to by mike320

Actually, I think MuseScore 3 will have a better method still - a setting to control above/below distance separately and allow you to easily flip between them. Not sure it's 100% in place, but I imagine it will solve this problem. The idea of having staff-specific styles is also good and could be useful even for five-line staves (eg, so the default position of dynamics could differ for vocal versus instrumental staves).

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