Note Stems Not Scaling with Hidden Note Heads

• Jan 2, 2021 - 16:09
Reported version
3.x-dev
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
MuseScore

When setting (non-middle) notes of a chord to 'Not Visible' the stems of that chord do not also scale their visibility. The result is a stem that extends beyond the note-heads.

stemNotScaling

One use-case where this is a hindrance: Using a single staff to create two parts - one chord-melody part and one that is the simple, single-note, melody line only. Rather than manage two separate staves for this it would be easier to be able to manage (compose, edit, etc) on the one staff and be able to simply hide the chord's harmony notes in the simple melody line part.

The work-around is to create a 2nd staff and delete the notes on that staff that you'd otherwise set to Not Visible on the 1st staff.

Attachment Size
StemNotScalingOnHiddenNotes_Screenshot.png 46.16 KB

Comments

• Jan 5, 2021 - 15:40

Marc - 'fix to line' - ok , but that does seem pretty tedious as you have to set the line to fix to to the melody note, one-by-one; and then keep adjusting them as you edit the arrangement. (Vs selecting all the melody notes and setting them to voice-3 en-mass).

Also, your comment about '...not really clear whether this is a bug...' - I gotta believe that 95% of the time if you are hiding notes in a chord you will want the stem visibility to adjust to the visible notes. Having an option to override that behaviour would be fine; but having to use a workaround to cover the 95% case feels like a bug to me...or at least a flaw in the design-spec (this, of course, assumes that most users would agree with my 95% claim; which I admit I have no hard data for).

Reply

• Jan 5, 2021 - 17:13

Hiding notes in a chord is a very unusual thing to do, probably 95% of users will never once do this. And for the very small number of cases where someone might have a reason to do this, it's pretty hard to guess what the intended behavior is. But one reasonably common one in my personal experience it to have a stem with no visible notehead at all, or one where I make the standard notehead invisible so I can lay a different non-notehead symbol in its place. I don't think I've ever personally encountered a situation where I wanted the stem to disappear. Not saying it doesn't happen, but that it's a rare enough situation overall that the very few times it does come up, it is probably for very different reasons that are hard to guess. In the absence of hard data, then, I'd have to assume it's more like 50/50 in terms of whether people expect the stem to disappear or not. And changing it at this point would just greatly annoy the 50% who would wonder why their stems suddenly disappeared.

So without really excellent evidence to the contrary, I would not be in favor of seeing the default behavior change. An easier workaround for the other 50% would be nice, though.

Reply

• Jan 5, 2021 - 17:15

FWIW, in your particular case, I think the vast majority of people would find it far simpler to just use a separate staff for the chord voicing. Or just allows MuseScore to play the chords and not worry about planting extra notes for playback at all. Certainly I've never seen anyone post an example like this that I can recall. So that's one reason I assume it's not so common.

Reply

• Jan 28, 2021 - 13:19

fwiw - I did find a use for the 'fix to line' feature for one of my purposes. Where I wish to show the note time values above a TAB staff I can simply select all notes in the SMN staff, and fix them all to line 0. Then change the SMN staff to show only 1 line. This works better than the "Note Symbols" option avail in TAB staffs as with this approach the rest symbols still show as rest symbols. Plus, in my world, for whatever reason, folks want to also see the stems and beams with the fret numbers even with the notes visible.

StemNotScalingOnHiddenNotes_AltIdea_Screenshot.png

Reply