Salient Soft

This requirement has come about when my Folk Ensemble leader gave me his MuseScore files for me to edit/transpose for alto flute.

I have already ‘rolled my own’ alto flute parts by using AudiVeris to perform OMR (Optical Music Recognition) on the PDF scores he provided, then exporting to an mxl file (a compressed MusicXML file), importing into the free version of MuseScore, and then transposing, formatting and exporting to pdf. However, the OMR is not always perfect, and gets some things wrong, like chord names, and general formatting/note stem up/down positioning etc.

Fortunately, I happen to have chosen the same music editing software as him. Therefore using his existing MuseScore files eliminates some of the cleaning up work and is less effort than the OMR route.

My early attempts produced a decent looking PDF, but were not using the correct instrument(s) on the Layout panel. The following steps successfully added alto flute tune and harmony parts to an existing project, and exported an alto flute pdf:-

1. Open the MuseScore file in MuseScore
2. Open the Layout panel using the tabs in the left column, then click Add to add a new instrument.
3. Search for alto flute and click add. Note that at this stage you cannot yet change the instrument name.
4. Do the same again to add a second one if required, e.g. one for tune and one for harmony. Both have the same labelling/name at this stage.
5. Close the add box and then click the settings gear wheel for each of the added alto flutes. You can then change both the full name and the short name as desired e.g. to label one as alto flute harmony.
6. Now click the Parts button at the top centre, and click Create new part to add and name a new part, e.g. “Alto Flute”. It will remain selected, so you can then click “Open selected” to open it.
7. Having opened it, use the Layout panel on the left to open the desired instruments using the eye icons. You need to open the tune and harmony you will be using as the basis for the alto flute parts, and also both the alto flute instruments added above.
8. The alto flute scores will both be empty. Now select the first bar of the tune stave for example by clicking in the lhs of the bar so that the bar is highlighted with a blue rectangle. Hitting ctrl/shift/end will then extend the selection to the whole of this stave. Then right click and select copy.
9. Now select the first, empty bar of the alto flute tune stave, then right click and paste. The whole tune stave will be copied into the alto flute tune stave. Note that as MuseScore knows that the instrument for the target stave is an alto flute, it automatically transposes up a 4th as it pastes in.
10. Do the same for the alto flute harmony part, and you should have both parts populated.
11. Now use the layout panel eye icons to close the instruments for the tune/harmony staves you pasted from, and you should end up with the new alto flute tune and harmony staves as desired.
12. In my initial attempt, the stave spacing was a bit off – the first 3 lines were rather too compressed, and the last line much too spaced out. I therefore selected a place at the start of the score, clicked ctrl/a to select the whole of both staves, resulting in all of both staves having blue rectangles around them. I then clicked  either  close curly brace, “}”, (or format/Stretch/Increase Layout Stretch), to stretch the first few lines and add more into the last one. In my case doing this 3 times gave me a good layout with even spacing on all lines.
13. You can then save the MuseScore file, and export a PDF of the part as required.

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