Centring lyrics under tied notes

• Feb 12, 2015 - 13:32

Hi,

I am new to MuseScore and am trying to copy a song into my first score. Can someone advise how lyrics can be positioned appropriately under tied notes? I have a quaver (eighth note) tied to a crotchet (quarter note) with the text "am," underneath and in the next bar the same with the text "have;". In both cases the quaver is centred over the word, rather than the word being centred under the two tied notes.

Thanks


Comments

If a note is tied, then you should have a melisma line after the syllable (press "underscore" as many times as there are tied notes, or hyphen if this is not the last syllable of the word). If you do that, then the syllable should be left-aligned automatically. This is the proper/standard behavior - left aligning to the first note, not centering between the notes.

If that doesn't answer your question, please post the score you are having problems with.

In reply to by Shoichi

[Shift] + underscore does as I have described, it just moves the lyrics entry field to the next note. No underscore is shown.

I've also tried [Ctrl] + [Shift] + underscore and that just adds an underscore to the lyrics under the current note.

Ah, now I've got it. I have to press [Shift] + underscore twice, once to move to the next note and once to add the underscore. However, having created the melisma, what do I do if I then decide I don't want it? I can 't select it with the mouse and if I go to the lyrics entry field under the second note, typing adds text on top of the melisma.

In reply to by Dangthrimble

The square is probably a temporary glitch that would go away on saving / reloading the score, maybe also just doing some other editing.

The fact that the melisma line doesn't continue on the next system is a long-standing limitation that was finally fixed a couple of weeks ago and should work fine the current nightly builds of 2.0 (this was after the two ebta releases; has to be a nightly build to see the fix).

In reply to by Dangthrimble

As I said, you have to press it as many times as there are syllables, in 1.3 and 2.0 Beta 2 anyhow. So the first press just takes you to the next note, but at that point, MuseScore doesn't know if you are going to enter a syllable or not, so it doens't draw the line yet. Only when you press underscore again on the second note does MuseScore understand you are not going to enter a syllable on that second note, so only then does it draw the line.

In the current nightly builds, MuseScore will draw the line immediately, because this behavior was confusing. It's still the case that it never make sense to only press underscore once - if you intend to enter a syllable on the next note, you should be hitting space, not underscore. So pressing underscore then immediately entering a syllable would be a strange and basically wrong thing to do. But at least you will see the line immediately upon pressing underscore the first time in current builds.

As for deleting the melisa, in current builds, you could just go back to the syllable and this time hit space. In 1.3 and 2.0 Beta (as opposed to current nightly) builds, this doesn't work unless it happens to be the last syllable of a multi-syllable word.

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