Tutorial 5: Working with Scores and Parts

It’s time to learn about PrintMusic’s more powerful score-oriented features. If you plan to work mainly on lead sheets, you may just want to skim this section. But if you intend to create multi-staff scores—particularly orchestral scores—you will want to go through this whole tutorial. By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to create from scratch a conductor’s score and parts.

If you have a document currently open, close it.

• Open the document called “Tutorial 5.” This document currently consists of a single staff, filled with music.
• From the View menu, select Scroll View. You may find that it is easier to do all of your editing work in Scroll View (where the music is laid out in a continuous horizontal band), especially when working with scores that contain several staves.
• Click the Staff tool  .
• From the Staff menu, choose New Staves. The Staff Setup Wizard appears asking you what staves you would like to add.
• Click on Strings in the left column, then double-click Violin, then Viola, then Cello. The three instruments appear in the right-hand column.
• Click Finish. PrintMusic has added three evenly spaced staves, giving you a total of four; let’s imagine that you’re going to create a string quartet.

You can reposition a staff by grabbing its handle and dragging it up or down. To remove a staff, click it and then press Delete.

To see more staves, select a smaller view percentage from the View menu, Zoom submenu.

Setting Clefs and Staff Names

If you use the Setup Wizard, you’ll have all of the clefs and staff names set up for you. If you decide you don’t like what the Wizard chose, you can always edit them using the techniques below. We’ll edit the new staves to match the appropriate clefs and names for a string quartet.

• Click the top staff. When you click anywhere on the staff to the right of the time signature, you select the staff. You can also use the Staff tool to select measures, such as for applying Alternate Notation.
• From the Staff menu, select Edit Staff Attributes. The Staff Attributes dialog box appears. (You can also double-click the staff.)

The full name of the instrument will appear next to the staff in the first system (line) of the piece. The abbreviated name will appear next to subsequent systems.

• Click in the text box called Full Name and type “Violin I”.
• Click in the text box called Abbr. Name and type “Vln. I”.

Incidentally, you establish the default font for staff names using the Select Default Fonts command in the Options menu (this will affect all staff names for newly created staves; it will not change existing staff names).

You could click OK at this point; you’d return to the score, where the first staff’s name would now appear. However, as long as you’re at it, you may as well set up the other staves:

• From the staff drop-down list at the top of the Staff Attributes dialog box, choose [Staff 2]. The contents of the dialog box change to reflect the staff attributes of the second staff in the score.
• Rename this staff Violin II, and enter Vln. II as its abbreviated name, then click OK.
• Double-click the bracket handle. A small box at either end of the bracket. The bracket attributes dialog box appears.
• Click where it says “Violin II” in the Staff drop-down list.Select Violin I to include the Violin I staff in the bracket.

• Click OK. Your bracket should now surround the staves of your entire string quartet.

Selecting Partial Measures; Transposing a Region

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?

• Click the Selection tool . You don’t need to change any settings to select partial measures, just learn a couple techniques.

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.

• Scroll to measure 6. Click and hold in measure 6, just above and before the third beat. Drag down and to the right, until you’ve selected the first two eighth notes in measure 7. When you release the mouse button, the region is highlighted.

• Hold down and press once. Notice the selection expands one note to the right.
• Hold down and press once. The selection contracts to its original size. When you first select a region, hold down and press if you want to adjust the beginning of the region instead of the end. Hold down and to expand and contract by full measures.
• From the Utilities menu, choose Transpose. The Transposition dialog box appears.
• Choose the radio buttons for Up and Diatonically. From the Interval drop-down list, choose Third. Click OK. You return to the score, and the selected region is now 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.

Inserting Staves

Let’s say we add a flute to our string quartet. We could use the same technique for adding staves as before, but this time we’ll save some work and let the Wizard create them.

• Click the Staff tool . The Staff menu appears. We want to insert our flute staff above the Violin I staff.
• Click on the handle of the Violin I staff. The staff handle is a small box on the top staff line near the clef.
• From the Staff menu, choose New Staves. The Parts page of the Setup Wizard appears.
• Double-click on the Flute in the middle column. The Flute instrument appears in the selection window.
• Click on the Finish button. The Wizard adds a Flute staff above our selected staff, in this case the Violin I staff.

Transposing Instruments

But what if we made a mistake? What if we really wanted to add a clarinet? You could delete the flute staff and add a clarinet from the Wizard, but let’s say you’ve already added music and you don’t want to lose it. We’ve already seen how to change the staff name earlier in this Tutorial, so we’ll just cover how to change the staff from a C instrument to a transposing instrument.

• Click the Staff tool .
• Double-click on the Flute staff to the right of the clef and signatures. The Staff Attributes dialog box for the Flute staff appears. Using the techniques you learned earlier, change the Staff Names to Clarinet and Cl., but don’t exit the Staff Attributes dialog box.
• Click the Transposition box and click Select. The Staff Transpositions dialog box appears. You could design your own transposition, but you don’t need to for common instruments, such as a clarinet, French horn or saxophone.
• Next to Key Signature, click on None to open a menu of choices. Select (B) Up M2, Add 2 sharps.
• Click OK twice. Your staff should now look like a clarinet staff, complete with transposition. All of the other non-transposing staves have two flats in the key signature, while the top staff has no flats in a Bf transposition.

When You’re Ready to Continue

Close your string quartet document, saving it if you want.

In the next tutorial, we’ll cover some techniques for Guitar notation and tablature. If you won’t be notating for guitar, feel free to skip Tutorial 6 ahead.

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