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I'm a rookie at MuseScore, and I'm having trouble when the rhythms are different in different parts. The piece I'm trying to enter is for flute and piano. I have a measure that starts with dotted 8th-sixteenth-eighth for the flute. This I can enter. The piano begins with the right hand playing quarter note over two dotted quarter notes. MuseScore doesn't seem to accept this, so I go with quarter plus eight. When I enter this, the flute part is changed.

So (1) how do I enter two notes for the piano that start at the same time but have different lengths, and (2) how do I keep it from changing the flute when I enter notes for the piano. Two manifestations of the same problem: different rhythms in different parts.

I downloaded a new version today, so I'm running version 3.4.2.9788.

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    I don't have the tool with me right now so I can't give visual instructions. Look in the bar with the note lengths for a button related to "voices" and mess with that. Also make a song with both a piano part and a flute part; don't put both on the same staff.
    – Legorhin
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 18:14

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Each rhythm in a measure on a single staff needs its own voice.

What I do for entering multiple voices (since Musescore seems to prefer defaulting to voice 1) is enter the first voice normally (the down-stemmed part, usually when transcribing a pre-written piece), then I select the measure and swap voices 1 and 2.

Voice swap menu

This results in the highlighted blue notes turning green (voice 2), and a blue (voice 1) whole-rest appearing in the measure.

After voice 1 and 2 swap

Then I select the measure, and enter the second rhythm for that measure, as normal.

Two voices one measure.

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  • What you can do (to save a step) is enter voice 1 first -- which will get down-stem notes -- and then enter voice 2. Voice 1's stems will be changed automatically to point upwards to accommodate the second voice.
    – Andrew Leach
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 11:25
  • Voices. I had no clue about voices. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction along with hints about how to control the process.
    – phv3773
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 15:05
  • I entered all the notes without difficulty (thank you , again), but my page has a lot of extra rests where one voice is silent. Is there any way to get rid of them?
    – phv3773
    Commented Feb 13, 2020 at 16:04
  • So you can delete rests that are in any voice other than 1 (blue) without affecting the placement of other notes in that voice, just by selecting the rest and backspacing. Depending on how it's written, the extra rests might be in voice 1; you can swap voices again so you can delete them. The shortcut X will flip stems if required on individual or selected notes. Also, you can make rests or other objects invisible with the V shortcut. (they get greyed out, by default, but won't print, and collision detection will then ignore 'em.
    – Nevin Williams
    Commented Feb 14, 2020 at 16:13

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