Advice/Guidance

• May 13, 2015 - 09:37

I'm re-formatting a song set for 4-part voices plus a piano accompaniment which is predominantly just series of chords, which is fine. However, when I get to bar 49 (attached) the last beat of the bar is a chord with the two lowest notes (Eb & G) as crotchets (quarter notes?) with the top note (Bb) a quaver plus another quaver.
I can't find any method of inputting that layout correctly. MuseScore either turns the whole chord into quavers or crotchets in which case I lose the last quaver, the "C".

I've had to enter the Bb & C quavers using first voice as everything so far and then go into second voice to enter the Eb & G crotchets but that introduces rests that I don't want. I know I can set the rests as "invisible" but surely there's a better way of doing this?

Using MuseScore 2.0.1 in Windows 7.

Any comments welcome as always.

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Comments

In reply to by Ewart North

A caveat here.

IME it is not a good idea to delete rests from voices.

It can cause problems further down the line should you wish to change things in the voice you have deleted rests from.

It can also screw up copy and paste big time.

Finally I have known doing this to cause MuseScore 2 to flag the score as corrupt next time you load it.

It is far better to make the unwanted rests invisible.

If you don't want to see invisible rests just uncheck the "Show Invisible" entry in the View menu.

In reply to by Ewart North

I have mixed feelings about deleting rests. Generally, I agree that it causes more problems than it is worth. It shouldn't flag anything as corrupt in itself, but the "holes" thus created can be difficult to fill later should you change your mind, and I wouldn't be *too* surprised if it turned out to be possible that these holes might lead to true corruption (overlapping notes in any voice, or holes in voice 1) later as you continue to edit. copy / paste, exchange voices, etc. Of course, that would be a bug and should be reported as such, and right now I'm not *aware* of any such issues in 2.0. It's just that knowing what I do about the code, it seems quite plausible. 1.3 almost certainly had issues that are most likely fixed now.

My main reason for not being comfortable with deleting rests is that those holes are hard to fill later, unless you don't mind the trick of exchanging voices to force the notes into voice 1 where the holes are re-filled automatically.

So I generally prefer hiding rests to deleting them, and in the kind of music I deal with regularly, this doesn't come up often: in most musical contexts, it's proper to keep the rests. But I recognize there are certain types of music where it is permissible to not show them - 4-part chorale arrangements being a very obvious case - and if I did more of that type of music, I might learn to be more comfortable with deleting rests to avoid the clutter. But even though it comes up reasonably often in solo piano as well, I still prefer hiding them, because that is exactly thr sort of music where I might change my mind about how I arrange it later, and I'd rather not need workaround to re-fill the holes.

What's the meaning, and point, of deleting a rest in Voice 2, 3, or 4 -- how is it different from hiding it and having "show invisible" not set? I can imagine that a deleting and re-creating is a bit different from hiding and re-instating, but that can't be the point. I'm missing something here...

In reply to by MikeN

I don't think you are missing anything. The end result is the same, but the process is different. Hiding rests means you still see the greyed out versions on screen unless your also turn off "show invisible". Deleting them means they are gone, but you have hard-to-edit holes in your score. Either way, it looks the same in the final print.

Thanks to everyone for your helpful comments.

I will go with what I've been doing, using another voice and setting the generated rests as invisible and NOT starting to delete them.

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