Ability to add lyrics to rests

• Jul 24, 2010 - 03:14

Hello. I'm asking for this feature because of two main things:
1. In musical pieces, sometimes there are some spoken lines in the middle of a song that go under a rest with a fermata, instead of cross-headed notes.
2. Sometimes, duets are written with one single staff, and before the lyrics you see an italicized "male:" or "female:" or something; it would be useful to add this to a rest before the male or female part starts.

For these two reasons, I think that we should be able to add lyrics to rests!
If that is already possible, I'm sorry for taking your time.

Comments

• May 15, 2012 - 02:20

I have seen another request for the ability to add lyrics to rests, and there was no response. I would like to second that request. I have found the lack of that ability frustrating because some pop songs these days incorporate a Rap segment for which there is no melody. So I just want to insert a chord symbol for a measure and be able to type lyrics underneath.

I typically save a song as a MIDI file to open in another program, and use a lead sheet to sing a vocal. I not only want to be able to write lyrics under the rests, but to also be able to space the rests sufficiently so there is room to insert the lyrics. As it is, since there is no way to space the rests, it is not even possible to write the lyrics underneath by hand.

If I am correct that there is no way to do this, please consider this a feature request.........Thanks.

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• May 15, 2012 - 18:03

You can right click a note -> note properties and set the velocity to 0.

As a side note, I think that changing the default behavior of not being able to add lyrics on a rest is a bad idea. In 99% of the case, there are no lyrics on rests.

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• May 15, 2012 - 18:24

Thanks......I will try that.

Re side note: If you listen to any pop radio stations these days, you will hear Rap segments or spoken lines with no melody in a much higher percentage than 1%. There is harmony there, but nothing that would show up musically on a lead sheat other than a chord symbol.

I just wrote a song with an eight bar Rap bridge, and I can tell you it is a pain not to have the ability to handle that easily.

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• May 15, 2012 - 19:13

Yes, but consider, if those notes had been sung instead of rapped, you'd have needed to enter the notes anyhow, so it's not really like having to enter notes is a particularly unusual or onerous task. Plus, if you really want to produce a good chart of a rap song, you wouldn't show rests, but instead, show the actual rhythms, which also would require entering notes (and then perhaps running the Slash Notation Style plugin to automatically turn that into rhythmic notation). Another advantage of entering the notes - whether you then show them as rhythmic notation or mark them invisible - is that the physical placement of the syllables within the measure then reflects the rhythm, and you automatically get the right notes into the right measures, etc.

Really, entering rap without rhythmic information does a hue disservice to that music, which is indeed all about rhythm. But if you really want to show the rap as if rhythm wee not important, another thing you can currently do is attach as many words as you want to a single hidden whole note, using ctrl-space to enter the spaces between words.

And yes, in the grand scheme of notated music, rap surely accounts for less than 1% of what is out there.

What this all suggests to me is, while sure, someone could spend a lot of time and effort developing a brand new user interface to make entering text without notes easier, the existing interfaces actually work pretty well as is. It's no more difficult than entering ordinary melodies, and entering it as ordinary rhythms makes it possible for the results to actually be readale as music. So I'd prioritize any such new facility accordingly.

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• May 15, 2012 - 22:18

I agree that rhythm is all-important in Rap music. But rhythm can be represented using rests, since they come in all the standard durations. That is what I was trying to do, but then had no space for lyrics, even for writing in by hand..

What I would like to ask is this: If you enter notes as either rhythmic notation or as invisible, as you suggest,, does that silence them, or would you still hear the notes in a MIDI file of the song? I need to have them silenced to work for me. So would these methods be alternatives to the suggested approach of reducing velocity of each note to zero?

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• May 15, 2012 - 23:22

Notes with slashes or "x" heads would be the standard way of notating this sort of thing, not rests. People don't read rests the way they read notes; attempting to notate a rhythm using rests would almost certainly result in your score being misread even if they understood your intent.

Yes, the slash plugin automatically silences the notes, but as mentioned above, that is also extremely simple to do manually. No one ever said you had to do it one note at a time - you can select a whole region and set velocity to zero in one operation (same with making slash or x noteheads). If you want to change the note heads to x's (I probably would) you'll need to do go to Note Properties for the selected region anyhow; just as easy to set the velocity while you're at it and skip the plugin.

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