issues entering chord symbols two per bar

• Jan 30, 2011 - 21:13

When creating lead sheets with two chord symbols in the same bar but not necessarily any notes to attach them to (eg, a whole note or rest in the measure), my habit in other programs has been to enter a whole page full of hidden half rests in a second voice/layer. That's actually my default lead sheet template in other programs, and it makes entering chord symbols a snap. Unfortunately, in MuseScore, these hidden rests in voice 2 defeats automatic stem direction in voice 1. Seems that if voice 2 contains nothing but hidden notes or rests, it shouldn't affect stem directions in voice 1. So instead, I've been only entering the hidden voice 2 rests where needed, and flipping voice 1 stems manually, which is a lot more work,

Anyone have any alternate methods that work well for them? BTW, actually entering a rest in voice 2 after entering notes in voice 1 seems unnecessarily difficult. The usual method of selecting a rhythmic value then hitting the usual rest shortcut does not do anything. I was finally able to get it to work using the special keyboard shortcuts to enter specific rest values - Shift-R, Shift-M to enter a half rest. But now I can't get that to work again. Why is that?

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• Jan 31, 2011 - 04:27

Thanks, that explains a lot. I think it must have been entering a note and deleting it that finally gave me the rest (and that is indeed an acceptable workaround now that I know) and not the Shift-R, Shift-M shortcut.

But I'm still hoping to hear other suggestions on the basic problem of entering chords where there are no notes...

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• Feb 1, 2011 - 00:21

I hope I'm not misunderstanding your problem, but ...

It's possible to enter 2 chords for a whole rest : here's how I do it :

select the whole rest, do ctrl-K, enter your 1st chord;

Then select the whole rest again, to ctrl-K again, enter your 2nd chord.
At first, the 2nd chord is on top of the first, but while you're entering it, if you press the right arrow key a few times it will move it to the right. (You have to be still editing the 2nd chord while you press right arrow).

That what I do all the time so that I don't have to mess with hidden stuff or 2nd voices.

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• Feb 1, 2011 - 02:53

Thanks - great suggestion! It's not totally ideal either, as the positioning can get messed up if you later alter anything about layout (adding stretch, changing system breaks, etc). So I wouldn't want to use this as a general technique. For empty measures, I think I'll keep using hidden rests. But it beats using hidden rests and then flipping stems for measures that do have notes.

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• Feb 14, 2011 - 22:38

For some reason, I had just assumed that since chord symbols can only be entered while selecting a note/rest, that the chord symbol was actually being *attached* to the chord/rest. Just realized that isn't so - chord symbols are attached to beat positions. It actually works to enter rests in voice 2, type in the chords, then *delete* the rests - the chord stays. Nice, but still awkward.

I figure MuseScore is like *this* close to being able to what I would want in terms of being able to easily enter a basic lead sheet with 2 chords per bar. All that is needed is an adjustment to the space bar logic while in chord entry mode so that it optionally stops at a specified beat interval in addition to (or instead of) stopping where there are actual notes. I could see one option where you tell MuseScore the interval to stop at (every two beats, every beat, etc) and another where you say if that's in addition to or instead of stopping where the notes are - although I could probably live without the latter option and just choose between beat-based and note-based stops. It's OK if the selection made here doesn't cover every possible case - we still have the various other methods of chord positioning. You could even enter most chords under one setting of this option, then change the option setting and go back and hit the chords that didn't.

But I'd say this would make a *huge* difference in the ease of using MuseScore to create most leadsheets. As I see it, this is really the only significant sticking point for the sort of thing most jazz musicians would be doing regularly.

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• May 9, 2011 - 19:10

How do you do what? Use the tab key to move on to the next beat? You don't, at least not yet - that's the feature I'm requesting.

To enter chords, you currently need to have a note or rest to attach to. So if you want to enter two chords in a measure where there is only a whole note or rest, you have two options:

1) enter both chords on the same note (they will overlap), then move the second one into position by hitting the right arrow a bunch of times after typing it. This is easy, but the alignment is just an approximation and can get messed up if you then reformat the score at all.

2) enter a bunch of half rests in voice 2, attach your chords to those, then delete the half rests leaving the chords behind. I personally prefer this approach.

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• May 9, 2011 - 20:03

is to attach both chords to the same whole rest. Enter one, grab it with the mouse and move it aside, then enter the second, and mouse them both to where they look good. (With lengthy chord symbols like slashes and minor 7 flat 5, etc., I sometimes shift them vertically for clarity and to keep them from overwriting each other.)

I'm thinking maybe it might be smarter to divvy the whole rest into halves or smaller first, so that the chords are attached to points in the time line in the right order and at the right durations. The way it works now, chord symbols are sort of like lyrics, just text attached to notes or rests. But if in the future they add the ability to play lead sheet chords, having two on the same beat may be problematic.

-- J.S.

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• Jun 13, 2011 - 15:56

I just thought of another option for adding chords mid-measure. It's arguably a bug (or two) that this works, but until we get Tab to move to the next beat or something akin to that, I'll hope they don't get fixed:

Add an instrument to your score. Fill it with half rests (or quarter rests, if you need chords on every beat). Enable "hide empty staves". Even though you've entered explicit rests, the staff goes away. I might otherwise have wanted explicit rests to suppress hiding of a staff, but right now I'm glad it doesn't. Now, enter a chord at the beginning of a bar in the regular staff, then hit space. It takes you to the middle of the measure - right where the rest is in the hidden second staff! Again, I've previously thought it was annoying that chord entry in one staff was affected by the presence of notes in another staff. It just never occurred to me before I could use this to my advantage!

Assuming someone doesn't plan to fix these bugs, this will probably become my default method for adding chords mid-measure, and I'll update my tutorial accordingly.

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• Jun 13, 2011 - 18:50

That brings us back to my original post in this thread :-). Hidden rests are how i used to do things in Finale; I stopped upgrading before they added a facility to do this more directly. The main issue I have with this in MuseScore is that hidden notes in voice 2 affect stems in voice 1. That's basically a bug, though, and could well be fixed.

Lasconic has pointed out to me that of the various workarounds that have been suggested, only the hidden rest approach produces reasonable MusicXML output. The method I just suggested results in the chord not being output at all. As does entering rests in voice 2, attaching chords, then deleting the rests, which is something else I've tried. This too, though is something that could potentially be fixed; apparently MusicXML does support such "disembodied" chord symbols. The method where you manually drag a chord into position from another note results in it still being attached to the original note in the MusicXML, though, and that seems unlikely to be easily fixable.

[ John: too late on the delete! :-) But my comments on MusicXML are worth preserving, so if you don't mind, I' leaving my response ]

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• Jun 13, 2011 - 19:30

idea.

What we're up against here, and in other places, is something that would take a massive amount of programming work to fix, perhaps even an overhaul of the data structure.

The way it works now, we have to enter notes or rests in order to have access to points on the time line other than the first beat of each measure. One trick I use is to make up a measure full of short rests, like eighths in 4/4, and copy and paste it throughout a blank score.

Something to think about, perhaps for MuseScore 3.0, would be an explicit time line running underneath the staff you're working on. Perhaps it could have three or more rows of tick marks. The top row would be beats in the time signature, for instance, four of them in 4/4 time. The second row would correspond to the next shorter duration, the eighths that come between the quarters. Then a third line consisting of the sixteenths that fall between the eighths and quarters. Click on a tick mark to move the entry point to that time. Then you could put chord names or notes in other voices where you want them, and let the computer mess with figuring out the rests.

Like I said, this would be a massive amount of work to program.

-- J.S.

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