Selecting partial measures; transposing a region

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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 $image\Selection_Tool.gif$ . 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 Windows users , Mac users , 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. 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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