adding vocal text and adding chords
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How do I write vocal parts, and keep the notes unbeamed? For example, four semiquavers written as four individually stemmed notes, rather than one group of four notes beamed together?
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How do I get text to appear underneath the individual notes, and not above?
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How do I write chords within a single stave?
Comments
see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/beams
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/chord-symbols
See also https://musescore.org/project/traditional-vocal-beaming
The plugin for Traditional vocal beaming as recommended by Jojo-Schmitz works very well if that is what you want. And for transcribing music published in earlier centuries, the plugin is very useful for enforcing a standard "unbeamed" approach. For example, the OpenScore Lieder Corpus of 1300+ transcriptions does generally use traditional vocal beaming: https://musescore.com/openscore-lieder-corpus/sets
However... as a singer with various choirs and choral societies, I have come to detest traditional vocal beaming. That is because it obscures the beat in complicated passages. And in discussion with two music publishers I have been asked to avoid traditional vocal beaming when submitting scores!
In her notation textbook "Behind Bars", Elaine Gould firmly deprecates the use of traditional beaming (notes generally with separate stems, unbeamed). Instead Gould recommends contemporary beaming as shown below:
![Vocal_beaming.jpg]( "Vocal_beaming.jpg")
In reply to The plugin for Traditional… by DanielR
As conductor of several choirs I agree 100% and have never used traditional beaming in my arrangements and compositions. At the same time it's useful to know several ways how to do it just in case.
For a global setting see Style > Notes > Flag style. Creates an even more bewildering effect.