Fix to Line - Use Case For Mountain Dulcimer TAB
Per Marc's suggestion in GitHub issue #11855: Fix to Line attribute missing below is my use case for putting the Fix to Line option back into the MS-4 user interface.
TL;DR: Standard convention for Mountain Dulcimer TAB is to include a standard notation staff (SMN staff) above the TAB staff. On the SMN staff only the single note melody line appears. In chord-melody arrangements the chord's harmony notes are suppressed, or hidden on the SMN staff; appearing only in the TAB as the appropriate string/fret marks.
Example: Star of the County Down. MS-3 file included here.
My Workflow ==
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Create new Musescore score using my normal template, which consists of one Standard Musical Notation (SMN) staff and one 3-string Mountain Dulcimer TAB staff.
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Transcribe and/or arrange the score using the SMN staff, with all fully noted chords as necessary.
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Copy / Paste the contents of the SMN staff onto the TAB staff. Musescore handles this perfectly and this then yields a proper, fully chromatic, TAB staff.
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Select the TAB staff and apply my plugin to it: "Chromo Tab 2 Diatonic." This redefines the chromatic fret numbers to the odd Mountain Dulcimer fret numbering convention. The result I get after this step is as below. This is not the final result, this is my working score, with all notes showing.
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Create a new "Part" (not an instrument, a Part; which appears as a new window/tab in the Musescore-3 user interface). Include both the SMN and TAB staffs into this new Part. This will be the published score for Mountain Dulcimer.
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HERE IS THE NEED: In the Part created in step 5 above, "hide" all of the non-melody line notes for this part. Ideally I would be able to simply select each note I don't want to be visible and click on some user interface component that might be labled, say, 'hide.' However, while you can hide a note-head, that action won't adjust the chord's stem length to match the visible notes. So, instead, I use the 'Fix to Line' feature to accomplish this. I have to both 'Fix' each non-visible note to the visible note's line, and then also hide the notehead so that it doesn't show as a double (or triple). Once this is accomplished, I have the following result, which is what is needed to publish the score to Mountain Dulcimer players - per standard convention.
- OPTIONAL: In some cases I also need the same arrangement as a complete Standard Notation part. In such cases I create a 2nd "Part" in Musescore, and include into this new part only the SMN staff. That staff has all the notes on it, and they are all visible. So I'm good to go. This SMN part will look like the below:
Additional Notes ==
A. One SMN Staff Per Part. Since I am often tuning and tweaking arrangements it really helps to be able use the one and only SMN staff for this purpose. An alternative to hiding or fix-to-line would be to create two SMN staffs. One for composing/arranging and making the TAB and a separate copy in which I totally remove the non-visible notes. But then every time I make a change I have to keep the two copies in sync. Which always results in additional errors. Esp when considering multi-part arrangements with melody, harmony, bass, etc.
B. Not About Diatonic. This posting is not about fixes or a work-around for steps 3-4 above. See Request for a Diatonic instrument definition for a discussion of that.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Star-of-the-County-Down_arr01_ENGRAVE.mscz | 46 KB |
| FixToLine_UseCase_Composing.jpg | 168.45 KB |
| FixToLine_UseCase_IntendedResult.jpg | 210.5 KB |
| FixToLine_UseCase_PartInSMN.jpg | 200.39 KB |
Comments
This seems quite the esoteric use case! But even so, I'm not really seeing why you'd need to use fix to line - it's clearly a hack and not at all the "correct" way to go about this. Plus the way you describe using it sounds like a ton of extra work. So, finding an alternative seems like it's the better way to go all around.
Best would be to simply make the notes invisible as you say. If that currently affects stem length, better to advocate for that behavior being changed, since that would have far greater applicability. but note, sometimes you do want the invisible noteheads to still affect stem length, so this would have to be a new property set on the note.
As it is, though, I see several alternatives that would work today and still make more sense than fix to line:
or
or
I'm guessing there is some subtle detail I am overlooking where these approaches would need further tweaking to be viable for you, but it sounds way better than painstakingly setting the fix to line property for dozens of notes one at a time (and then hoping you never need to transpose the song).
In reply to This seems quite the… by Marc Sabatella
> This seems quite the esoteric use case!
Right?! As I said somewhere, I am probably the only person on the planet with this use case (as far as I can tell all other folks making Mtn Dulcimer TAB are using TablEdit).
Your alternative suggestions may have some merit, I'll have to work through them. I will say tho that creating more staffs is not appealing to me as I am often tweaking and tuning the arrangements, so having the one 'system of record' staff - the SMN staff - is kinda crucial to me. I did use multiple staffs originally and I found that I just wasn't able to keep them in sync as I made changes. Multiple voices...maybe. I'll see.
Now let me add this bit: I did create a plugin for myself that automates step 6 - the Fix-to-Line part. Mostly. At the 90% level the melody line will be the highest pitched notes. So my plugin simply goes through each chord on the SMN staff and "hides" the lower pitched notes by doing a fix-to-line and hide notehead on each. After the plugin runs I just need the Fix-to-Line option in the inspector so I can tweak the odd 5-10% of misses. So really, for me, just having the Fix-to-Line option back in the UI would be clean, simple, and lovely for my need. (Well, not as lovely as a proper hide note option, but still....)
> Best would be to simply make the notes invisible as you say
Exactly. Which is what Tantacrul, I think, suggested in his comment @ https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/11855#issuecomment-114793…. But I don't think that feature request is going to happen in my lifetime (confession: I am 70 yrs old, so I mean this quite literally!) which is why I chimed in with - 'can't we just have the 'ol Fix-to-Line option back' comment.
In reply to > This seems quite the… by rocchio
I get that duplicating staves isn't ideal, but neither is going through each. and. every. note. one. by. one. to. fix. the. line. And then hoping you never ever change the music in any way or you'll need to redo that work. And of course, your reservation with duplicate staves was also about the need to update after change, so really it's a failing of either method. But it's trivially easy to generate the extra staves compared to setting hundreds of fix to line properties one by one, So still almost certainly an enormous win.
Of course, if you have a plugin to automate the fix to line stuff, that plugin would also work on MU4, so the lack of a built-in UI feature for it should be irrelevant. You could improve the plugin to miss fewer cases (can't see why it couldn't be made essentiually perfect), and/or use the existing fix to line plugin to manually tweak.
But anything involving fix to line is just inherently inferior to the other approaches, which are likely to be less work and to just make more logical sense. And be supproted right out of the boxc today, no new features or plugins required.
In reply to I get that duplicating… by Marc Sabatella
> ...it's trivially easy to generate the extra staves compared to setting hundreds of fix to line properties one by one, So still almost certainly an enormous win.
But given my plugin I don't see that this is necessarily a true statement. Anything involving add'l staffs is, I believe, bound to be more work when considering ongoing edits and revisions. Using a 2nd voice - maybe less work; but I still have to select them all to move, so a plugin is still in the mix to reduce that effort.
So I'll just state, again, that for me the best answer is a 'hide note' feature that properly scales the stem. Least amount of work, minimal impact on the score overall, no notable challenges when going back and revising the arrangements.
Disclaimer: fwiw, I actually disagree with the Dulcimer community's use of that SMN staff above the TAB. To my mind, if you are going to play from TAB then, well, play from the TAB. Why do you need the add'l staff? What folks tell me is they need it to 'see' the note durations. But if that's true then there is something wrong the formatting of the TAB staff, and that's what should be fixed. But this all falls on deaf ears. By and large the community will not accept sheet music absent that SMN staff.
All that being said - Thanks Marc for your thoughts and insights. I'll play around with your ideas and determine what works best for me.
In reply to > But it's trivially easy to… by rocchio
I guess if we we allow for the case of users who know about and have installed plugins, then the whole discussion is kind of moot, because a fix to line plugin exists also, I'm more concerned with the degree to which MuseScore supports reasonable real-world use cases out of the box. I agree that better control over stem behavior is the answer. But still, for now, if it were me, unless this were a score I was constantly make major changes to, I'd personally not want to rely ion the fix to line hack, plugin or no. Even if it's a little more work, the separate voice/staff makes more logical sense to me.