Up to this point, you’ve done all your manipulation of music in one-measure increments. Using the Selection Tool, you’ve clicked a measure to select it, drag-enclosed several whole measures, clicked the first measure and -clicked the last measure, or clicked in the left margin to select an entire staff.
But selecting a measure at a time is like selecting a word at a time in a word processor—it’s a nice shortcut, but sometimes you need to select in smaller units.
What if you want to select half a measure—or only one note?
In the musical example you have on the screen, for example, suppose you decide that a certain passage in the Violin I part would sound better if it were up a third.
If a region including partial measures is too big to drag-select (e.g. on different pages), drag-select a smaller region that begins where desired, navigate so the desired end-point is in view, then hold down d and click to specify the end of the selection. If you do want to select a whole measure, double-click the measure. (If you double-click a second time, and your score has more than one staff, you extend the selection vertically, to include the selected measures in every staff - also called the “measure stack.”)
The technique you just learned—selecting a region, then applying a command from the Utilities menu—is extremely powerful. Select some music, and then take a glance at the commands in this menu to the other available options. In addition to Transpose, they include Rebeam (which affects how notes are beamed together after you’ve already entered the music); Fit Measures (which, in Page View, forces a group of selected measures into one system); and many other convenient features. With a combination of the Selection Tool and the Utilities menu (and Edit menu), you should be able to transform any music in your score in any way you can imagine.
Use the following key commands to quickly transpose a selected region: /-6 = Down M2, /-7 = Up M2, /-8 = Down octave, /-9 = Up Octave.
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