Three completely unrelated requests (okay, 1 and 2 go together)

• Jul 22, 2014 - 22:23

Request #1: Under the "create score from template" option, I would like a Symphony Orchestra option. It should be easy to implement, and I'm sure there's several people who would greatly appreciate not having to manually add all the instruments for any symphonic works they want to compose.

Request #2: Ability to save a specific instrumentation as a score template from the instrumentation selection screen. I'm sure there are users who are part of performing groups with unusual instrumentation who would like to compose for their group; the ability to save custom score templates would greatly increase convenience for this particular group of users.

Request #3: Recognize the contrabass as a transposing instrument; bass parts are written as a standard bass clef sounding an octave below written, not as a 8vb bass clef. I am a bassist (as you may have guessed from my username), and this is just a small nitpicky thing that kinda bugs me.

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• Jul 22, 2014 - 22:37

#1 is a good idea. There is "chamber orchestra" and it's close but a little small.

#2 is already possible. Well, not directly from the instrument window, but just save any score (after deleting all content, including title and all measures) and place it in the templates folder.

#3 is also possible if you prefer to set things up that way. You can either do this in your own templates (by changing the staff properties for the contrabass staff in the score), or you can do it globally for all new scores by editing instruments.xml. However, you may wish to reconsider doing that once you try it. The reason (I assume) it is done the way it is done is so that pressing the "Concert Pitch" button doesn't end up transposing your part down an octave and require a bunch of ledger lines below the staff. The trick of using the octave clef for this is used by other notation programs as well. FWIW I do think 2.0 will allow you to have different clefs depending on concert pitch state, so you could have 8vb for the concert pitch version and regular bass clef with concert pitch off.

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• Jul 23, 2014 - 01:00

Can instruments.xml set up the concert clef differently than the transposed clef? If so, then we could set concert clef to the 8vb bass clef, but transposed clef to regular bass, and set transposition to octave. We could do the same for the other bass instruments, and actually, similar for guitar, piccolo, and other transposing instruments.

However, I am not sure it really makes sense to. Although historically the "8''s were not usually included on clefs for these instruments as far as I know, modern publishing practice (perhaps in part because of how notation software works, but it's also just a 20th-21st century thing) makes it more common, and I think many may be accustomed to them and wonder if something is wrong if they don't see them. See Gould p. 506.

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• Jul 23, 2014 - 08:43

There was a change in music engraving practice which began I think in the 1990's to notate octave-transposing instruments with an 8 above or below their clef. When I first started studying classical guitar all scores were notated in treble clef, but more and more scores started to use the treble clef 8vb as we got towards the end of the 20th century.

So we have a bit of a quandary - older players of octave transposing instruments will expect their instruments to use the standard clef and transpose, and younger players will expect the modern clef showing the octave transposition.

The solution would be to provide both perhaps?

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• Jul 23, 2014 - 14:08

True that the template mechanism isn't obvious in 1.3. It will become somewhat better in 2.0, as you won't need to save to the installation folder - there will be a Templates folder under your own home directory, along with your own local Styles folder and others. In any case though, saving templates from the instrument isn't a good way to go, since most of the things interesting about a template - the customizations you do to staff spacing, instrument names, font choices, etc - won't have happened yet.

I suppose the one thing that could be done to make thing more obvious would be to have a "Save as Template" option in the File menu that really was the exact same thing as Save As except it defaults to saving in the Templates directory.

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• Jul 22, 2014 - 22:49

Hi Jimmy,

All the supplied templates are going to be reworked for the release of MuseScore 2 and Symphony Orchestra will definitely be on the list for inclusion. It would be helpful which Symphony Orchestra you have in mind - Mozart? Haydn? Beethoven? Brahms? Mahler? These composers all had differing requirements for the instrumentation. Beethoven in particular became more demanding about his instrumentation as his career progressed - so let us know what you would like to see.

If you have other ideas for templates to be included, please let us know - templates are going to become more important as it is envisaged that the default option will be to produce a score from a template rather than from scratch, although there will always be an option to produce a custom score.

The thinking behind this is that new users can get up and running with commonly used score formats with a couple of clicks rather than have to wade through the custom score creation process, which can be offputting :)

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