A couple of Musescore questions

[knobby]

Hi all,
I'm trying to enter a simple score into Musescore 3 (my iMac won't accept v4) and I'm a little stuck so hoping someone can help me. First, I'm entering chord symbols and using the spacebar to move between notes/beats. But how do you put a chord symbol where there is no note? I've marked up a couple of the positions in the pic below.


Second, how do you split the bars onto different lines without having such a huge gap between them?

Thanks

 

[David A]

First question doesn't seem to have a simple answer that is robust to score changes later but an easy option is th add a second chord to the note and then drag it to the position you want it to be in.

You can use spacers from the Breaks and Spacers pallette to control the gaps between lines. In your case use the fixed spacer, the one without an arrow-head). Click on bar, click on fixed spacer in pallette, drag the ends of the spacer to achieve the effect you want.

Hope that's helpful

 

[debra]

Odd that Musescore 4 doesn't want to work on your iMac. I am using the latest version now, on my (Intel) Macbook. But this is my first successful attempt at v4. Until now I did everything with Musescore 3.
That said, instead of using a kludge to place the text where you want (by manually moving a text item into position) a "real" solution is to create a second voice on the same staff, "below" the first voice, and put some notes there. I would place all 1/8th low D notes in the second voice. Then you change the properties (in the inspector) to make the notes not play and to make them invisible. You can then add the bass notation (as lyrics) to align with the 1/8th notes.
As for the spacing, go to format->style->page and there you can set a minimum and maximum system distance. You may think you are dealing with staff spacing, but that's the spacing of staffs within a multi-voice score. The spacing you want here is the spacing between each multi-staff (in your case just single staff) "system" of staffs.

 

[Rosie C]

The way I get around the chord problem would be to change the E note to a quaver. Musescore will add a quaver rest. Add the extra chord to the rest, then change the E back to a crotchet. It's a bit fiddly, but the chord is in the right place and will play correctly.

 

[JeffJetton]

Some good advice so far on question #1 (I'd go with Paul's method if it were me). But I'm wondering why you'd want to put a chord symbol there? If you are to play an Am chord pattern for that first measure, for example, the standard notation method would be to just put an Am over that first note on beat one, and then you're done until the chord changes on the next measure.

For your second question, formatting with MuseScore is a bit of a dark art. You'll want to go into the Format->Styles... menu, then pick the Page section on the left. You'll get all sorts of twiddly numbers you can adjust that will control how things are formatted throughout your score.

A more quick-n-dirty method would be to add a Staff Spacer Down object to your bottom staff and drag it as tall as you want. That's found in the Palette under Breaks and Spacers. It's the down-arrow thingy.

 

[murathan]

You put two 8th notes instead of one 4th. Thisway you will have a note to put a chord symbol. Use slurs to make it sound a 4th note again.

 

[debra]

Here is what I explained:
I added 8 times an 1/8th note D, then selected these 8 notes, made them stemless, set them to not play and to be invisible.
Then I added the lyrics to that second voice.
This is how it looks in Musescore.

And the output is:

No need to make it more complicated than it is.