Writing a multi part piece for different instrumental groups
A problem with the current version of Musescore is the lack of a feature to include other scores into a larger work. This was apparently a feature (album) in some earlier versions, but has been difficult to implement in the Musescore 3 versions.
I'm curious to know what other people do about this. Do they just select an empty score, with a full orchestral set, and then hide or delete the staves they don't want for each section, or do they write the sections separately in individual files, and then try to copy the appropriate staves into the final version?
It is clear that writing longer pieces for more instruments (and possibly singers as well) is going to be harder, and perhaps many will be deterred or won't try, but the current version of Musescore does not seem to make things as easy as it might be.
Is this something which is easier in other software, such as Sibelius, Dorico, Cresendo or Finale?
Comments
Assuming I am writing a single piece of music to be performed by a single ensemble, I create it as a single file, no matter how big the ensemble, how long the work, or how many movements it is divided into. I see no disadvantage to this and no advantages to any other method that would offset the obvious major disadvantages of creating sections separately. Hide empty staves does what I need, nothing particularly hard about it.
If on the other hand I am creating a set of unrelated pieces but happen to want to see them printed together for whatever reason, I do those as separate scores then export to PDF and use a PDF-jpining utility to combine them if necessary. Or I just print them and stack the pages as desired myself.
In reply to Assuming I am writing a… by Marc Sabatella
You are describing what works for you. That doesn't work for me, or at least not with my knowledge of MS right now. Indeed a particular problem is finding the staves which disappear - and I know we've discussed this before. I know there are ways to make this work, but I can't always remember them, and they are a bit clunky. Even though I do have big screens I still have to shrink the font size to work with the size of the pages if all the instruments are show, and if they are not - then I have the issue of the staves which disappear.
Another thing that doesn't work is that I really do like to swap sections over, and perhaps also to do what in DAW terms would be called layering. I would like to be able to treat large sections - viewed both horizontally and also vertically as objects which could be duplicated, or remapped to other parts of pieces I work on. You may not like that techique but it's what I do at present, and it works for me.
In desperation I could output scores to Midi, input into a DAW do the remapping there, and then import back to MS, though then I'd have to put a lot of the articulation, dynamics etc. back in. I don't believe it would be impossible to get the functionality I'm asking for in MS, as the basic underlying data structure could be considered as a 2 dimensional matrix, or alternatively as a list of lists, plus of course additional lists to support the notation and other features. Maybe the implementation languages which are being used for MS don't make some of these approaches easy, though there are languages, such as some functional languages, which would probably make it fairly trivial.
I think MS is a great tool, but it's not perfect, and maybe it wouldn't actually be too difficult to make some big improvements along the lines I'm suggesting.
In reply to You are describing what… by dave2020X
Well, you asked how others do it, so I told you how I do it. Not saying you need to do things the same way.
But I don't understand the issues you refer to. What do you mean about "finding" a staff - is there a context in which you don't know where a staff is? Not sure what it is we've discussed before that you find clunky. As always, posting a specific score and describing problems specifically goes a long ways towards us being able to understand and assist.
Not sure where you got the idea that I don't like swapping sections? But also, I don't see how that has anything to do with anything. The swap with clipboard command in MsueScore works equally well whether copying between separate files or within a single file.
Also not sure what you mean about MIDI and remapping, but again, if you attach and actual score and describe a specific issue, a particular problem you are having trouble figuroung out how to solve with that score, someone can probably help you pretty quickly.