Whenever I modify the rhythm of a melody I already have I have to completely rewrite it.
When I shorten/lengthen notes in a melody it adds rests/deletes notes. Once it has added a rest I cannot move the rest out of the way. I have to rewrite the entire bar every time I want to change the length of a single note. This makes it very frustrating to write.
I think that a feature to check to make sure the notes fill or don’t over fill the bar could be useful. However having properly written bars enforced at every second of the writing as the default is a huge mistake. If there is someway to turn this off please help me.
I also don’t understand why you can’t manually edit the bar spacing. It seems I have to space out the notes in order to manipulate the bar which is silly to me.
Comments
You can "freely" modify the melody within one single bar using the insert mode.
You can't do it score wide, that is a well known long standing request. There have been long discussions in the past about it but nothing done yet. If that is absolutely necessary for you you can use Lilypond or Dorico (expect to get the common answer that you can in fact already do it in MuseScore using cut & paste...)
For your other question about manually editing bar spacing, I don't get it. MuseScore "spaces" your bar automatically, using all kind of customizable style settings, so what would be the added value to still do manually? (And in fact you can do it using offset)
In reply to You can "freely" modify the… by frfancha
Thank you. You are right that the cut and paste suggestion doesn’t work great for me but it’s better than before. I will also try insert mode again and look into these other programs.
Not always.
If you shorten a note there is a pause after it, yes. Then select the remaining notes of the measure, cut them, and paste them back in the right place. Then the rest moves to the end of the cut part.
If you lengthen a note, the following one(s) will be overwritten so that the lengthened note can have the correct duration. Otherwise, the bar length would be increased.
What do you mean by editing the bar spacing? You can always use the zoom or the stretch function to make editing easier.
I want to clarify that with making notes longer it is also very frustrating because muse score will automatically overwrite the notes I’ve manually entered rather than the rests at the end of the bar.
When you think about it, MuseScore is doing exactly what you told it to do. So you shorten the half note on beat one to a dotted quarter. That's what MuseScore does. It gives you a dotted quarter followed by an 8th rest. MuseScore has no idea what you want besides that. You may have been expecting the other notes to move left. Or maybe you want to add an 8th note after the dotted quarter. If the latter where the case and MuseScore moved notes to the left, you would have to rewrite the measure. MuseScore can't guess what you want. So it doesn't. There are many things I might not like, but the fact that MuseScore always wants proper measures isn't one of them.
Don't move rests. Overwrite them. For me, insert mode is dangerous.
In reply to When you think about it,… by bobjp
I’m perfectly capable of adding in a rest if needed in programs where that feature is provided. But I can’t disagree more. In no moment have I told the program to add anything so why would it? It is making a far greater assumption to change anything aside from what I specifically change. Especially in the instances in which it deletes my work because the notes momentarily don’t fit in the bar.
In reply to I’m perfectly capable of… by akivalev
But the program doesn't add anything. I select a half note. That tells the program I am working with 2 beats. I change the half to a dotted quarter. Now what is the program supposed to do with the leftover 8th? It doesn't know what I want to do. So it has to account for two full beats because I told it to. So in order to do that it must put an 8th rest.
Now had I entered a dotted quarter on beat one, there would be an 8th note instead of a rest.
And there is more at stake than one measure. Say I just want the notes in the measure to move left or right after I change one note. All the notes in the rest of the staff move, too. That's probably not what I want.
The way MuseScore works is that once you place a note with a given pitch and time position, it is assumed you want to keep it there unless you explicitly move it. So if you change something earlier in the score, that note doesn't move. if you want to move a note to different time position, just do that directly; don't try to trick MuseScore into changing its time position by fiddling around with other notes.
The whole point is that you 8don't* need to rewrite measures completely. If you've already entered notes into beats 3-4 of a measure, you can be assured that merely fiddling around with beats 1-2 will leave your beats 3-4 notes safely where you wrote them, unless of your you do something that prevents a note from being possible on beats 3-4, like changing the note on beat 1 to a whole note.
MuseScore's default spacing should be pretty much perfect by default in almost all cases - you shouldn't normally need to change the spacing. if you continue to have trouble, please attach your score and describe what you are trying to do in more detail.