Lyrics under grace notes
I know that this has been discussed before (not by me -- https://musescore.org/en/node/183341), and I use the workarounds suggested in that thread, but they are really quite crude. Placing both the grace-note syllable and the main sylllable under the main note, and then fiddling around with the spacing, works well enough when there's only one grace note and one extra syllable; but when there are more then one, it looks absolutely terrible (especially since it seems to be impossible to move around the spacing of multiple grace notes relative to each other). And if one changes the size of the score as a whole (using Format --> Page settings), it messes up the spacing that one has programmed, because the spacing is absolute, not relative.
There really should be a simple way to enter lyrics under grace notes, just as one would do under any other note. I am told that in Finale it is trivially easy. Can anyone work on this feature for the next update of Musescore? Thanks!
Comments
I didn't know lyrics could go under grace notes.
In reply to If a note has enough of a… by Al Loast
In Eastern European Jewish cantorial music, grace notes with lyrics are used in almost every piece. See the attachment, from The Musical Tradition of the Eastern European Synagogue by Sholom (Sylvan) Kalib, one of the greatest musicologists in American academia (volume 3A, p. 228). See the opening grace notes in measures 45 and 47, each with the syllable "mi". In addition to composing, I also work in transcribing manuscripts of music of this genre, and I have no easy way of transcribing the grace notes with lyrics, which come up all the time.
This is definitely a feature that we need on Musescore. We have lots of features of non-Western music, such as half sharps and half flats, and many others. We certainly need someone to add this feature. Thank you.
In reply to In Eastern European Jewish… by gavrielwasser
See #44411: Add ability to add lyrics to grace notes
In reply to See #44411: Add ability to… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks. It seems that nothing ever came of that suggestion in 2015. I see that you encouraged adding this feature in 2018.
In reply to Thanks. It seems that… by gavrielwasser
And did again today
In reply to And did again today by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks. I hope that some of the coders will see it and do something about it.
In reply to If a note has enough of a… by Al Loast
I'm trying to notate the Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas". In the repeat section when I get to"E-lev-en pip-ers pip-ing" I need to put the "E" on a grace note so that the "lev" can fall on the downbeat of that measure.
In reply to I'm trying to notate the… by Jason Hunsaker
You could use an Elision slur https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/lyrics#elision, though here I think I would just put "Ele-" under the first note as usual and then in Inspector offset it slightly to the left to align with the grace note.
In reply to I'm trying to notate the… by Jason Hunsaker
I wouldn't recommend doing it that way even if it were possible. Better to show that note in a second voice in the previous measure. That's the way alternate rhythms are normally shown - not using grace notes
In reply to I wouldn't recommend doing… by Marc Sabatella
I ended up using voice 3, setting it to silent, making it small, and manually offsetting it so that it is generally in the right place. The other place I needed it, I just moved it to the previous measure.
In some other notation software grace notes are just being considered as normal notes - just smaller,
which is why the issue does not occour. The advantage is: You can still skip them for lyrics, if you want to, but you don't have to like in Musescore, so this is a bit of a problem. It would be great, if this could be improved.
The suggested workaround does not work for me, when there are multiple grace notes, and when the syllables require a hyphen between them. See attached file. Binding lyrics to the grace notes themselves should be possible in MuseScore and I very much support this feature request.