Grace notes after a note feature

• Jan 16, 2015 - 20:30

Hello. Like many of you out there I am an aspiring [and starving :-) ] songwriter who has been blessed by this fantastic public domain music transcription program. Unfortunately, I have come across a feature that is sadly lacking in MuseScore 1.3 and 2.0 beta. That feature is the ability to insert grace notes at the end of a measure. Some of the verses of songs I have written have the accent on the first syllable of a phrase Ii.e. the first beat of a measure). Sometimes, however, a verse will want the second syllable of a phrase accented, thus necessitating the first syllable to be included at end of a previous measure. I will give you an example. In a song I wrote called "Sold Out To Your Spirit, line 3 of verse 1 reads:
"By Your Spirit, make the things of this world fade away."

Line 3 of Verse 3 reads:
"An intimate communion Lord, under Your mighty wings."

"By" in Verse 1 occurs on the first beat of 9th measure. The first syllable of "Intimate" is the first beat of the 9th measure in Verse 3 This means that "An" in Verse 3 needs to be included as the last beat of the 8th measure. Since grace notes can only be placed before a note (the 8th measure of Sold Out To Your Spirit is a whole note), I have no way of getting a grace note to show up as the last note of the 8th measure. Is this something that could easily be included in the final MuseScore 2.0 program? A simple switch (before / after?) could be included in the grace note section. As I cannot program myself out of a wet paper bag to save my life, I do not know how many lines of code and the man-hours it would take to do this. I do know that in modern song-writing, there are notes that have singing associated with them on one verse, while other verses do not include them. Could the "MuseScore Muses" possibly bless me with this feature? I would be deeply in their favor. Thank you.

Comments

• Jan 17, 2015 - 00:07

"Grace notes after' is alreayd a feature of 2.0 beta - just check the grace notes palette (you might need to swithc to "Advanced" mode first using the dropdown menu at the bottom of the palettes).

But it isn't really clear from your description that this is what you want. Grace notes by definition take no time, and they currently cannot have lyrics attached to them. Plus, they are rendered differently and wouldn't be appropriate for use as ordinary pickups. I think perhaps what you are trying to do is more naturally done by imply using normal notes at the end of the measure - perhaps in a separate voice, Hard to tell from your description; this is one of those cases where a picture really would be worth 1000 words.

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• Jan 17, 2015 - 02:55

Thanks for pointing out the advanced option of the grace notes section. I see the "Muses" have given me three options: 8th, 16th and 32nd note after the selected note. The good news is that by padding the lyrics of the previous note with Control-Spaces, you can push the word over to the right so it aligns under the grace note. This is a good fix for those like me who are primarily interested in generating hard copy replications of their music (I just wish the Muses offered me a quarter note option). I padded the area between "through" and "An" with about 5 Ctrl-Spaces.

It appears that the grace note is a set distance away from its parent note. It can not be moved farther away. It's workable from a print copy standpoint.

One thing I did notice is that when the pitch of the grace note is changed to something different than its parent note (in the screen shot the whole note is an F and the grace note is a C) when the piece is played, the pitch of each note is reversed. A middle C is played for the whole note and an F is played for the eighth grace note. I'm not sure how to let the Muses know about this bug. Any ideas?

grace note after shot.jpg

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• Jan 17, 2015 - 04:50

Yes, as I suggested previously, grace notes are the wrong way to do this. That's not a grace note, it's a perfectly normal eighth note, and should be entered as such - or as a quarter note, since that's what you apparently really want. If you still want the whole note to display as a whole note and not a dotted half or whatever, enter it into another voice and hide the rests. You can also make it small if you want, using the Inspector.

Anyhow, that's part of your problem - you are trying to use grace notes for something they were never intended to be used for. But for the record, the position of grace notes is not fixed; you can move them using the Inspector (although double click and arrow key works too). And while quarter note grace after are not really proper (they are meant more for trill endings, which are traditionally notated with eighths or sixteenths), you could if you wanted to make a quarter just by selecting a normal grace and changing it's duration, same as you would for any other number (eg, press 5).

The fact that grace notes after still playback before is a known limitation of grace note playback.

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• Jan 17, 2015 - 18:28

You have convinced me to go the inspector route instead of the grace note route. One thing that still remains unresolved is that the pitch of the grace note and its parent note are switched on playback. Try it if you would. I think the program is used to seeing the grace note before the regular note and plays it that way, even though one has specified that the grace note comes after the regular note.

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• Jan 17, 2015 - 18:30

Yes, as I mentioned, it is a known limitiation of MuseScore's playback facility that grace notes after a note do not play back correctly. I'm actually about to just disable their playback for now - no playback at all is better than wrong playback. Someone can always add in the correct functionality later.

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• Dec 14, 2016 - 17:09

Hello Marc,

I created a score with MuseScore 2.0.3 containing grace notes before a note (frequent case) and after a trilled note.

The display is fine, but when exporting to MusicXML, I can't see any difference between the two use cases : all the grace notes simply contain a element.

So that when I import the MusicXML back into MuseScore, they all appear as regular grace notes before another one.

Isn't there a way to have the 'before- and after the note' cases distinguishable in the MusicXML text, not to lose this difference?

Thanks!

Jacques.

Attachment Size
GraceNotes.mscz 3.79 KB

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