Very long notes

• Mar 28, 2019 - 21:12

From my days playing jazz charts written by Hank Levy (whose notation was a little...unorthodox; great charts, though), I'm used to being able to represent a note that takes up an entire measure in an odd time signature by the use of what I originally construed to be a mathematical symbol, namely, a whole note surrounded by vertical lines, as if to say the absolute value of the whole note, to wit, the entire measure. I don't know if it was unique to Hank; but I do know that most of my contemporaries from the time understood the notation. Apparently, that notation is so unorthodox that MuseScore is not able to recreate it, especially considering that the whole note surrounded by vertical lines has a specific value in MS, namely, an double whole note of eight quarter-note beats. Am I right?


Comments

You can do this rather easily provided the note can be indicated by a single note having up to 4 dots. An example of where this will not work is a dotted half note with a 16th note tied to it (11/16 time) without a major workaround.

Select the note you want to modify the appearance of
In the inspector
* check stemless
* change the note head type to Breve
* if applicable, click the dots button and press v. Select the note and repeat for each existent dot. (this is often easier than trying to click a dot)

The workaround for other notes consists of using tuplets described in https://musescore.org/en/node/260646 to create a single note and making the tuplet number invisible and the following the above steps as needed.

Click on the whole-bar rest
Add ->Tuplets-> Other
Enter 1/n where n is the number of beats in the bar (1/12 for 12/8, 1/7 for 7/4 etc)
Tick “None” for both Number and Bracket
Enter your note

Go to Inspector
Make the note Stemless
Set Head Type to “Breve”

WholeBarNotes_OddTS.mscz

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.