Is it possible to advance a note selection on multiple staves to the next note/set of notes on the same multiple staves? If there is, I cannot seem to find it in a search.
No, I’m afraid not.
OK, thanks for the quick reply. Is this something that might be reasonably possible in the future? I often find that I’ll select, for example, all quarter notes on the downbeat of four horn parts to add an articulation, and then want to similarly add an articulation to a quarter note down the line. It would be great to be able to simply arrow to the right on all parts simultaneously to add the next group of articulations. Perhaps there’s a better way to do this currently, but my process involves having to grab the mouse and reselect.
I can marquee select a selection of horn notes in one measure and then hold down CTRL (on Windows) and marquee select horn notes in a different measure. Would that help you streamline your workflow?
Hi Derrek,
Thanks for the idea. That method does work sometimes, but the problem for me with the marquee selection is that it selects all notes within a range, and I generally do not want to add the articulations to all of the notes in a passage—or at least not the same articulations.
I find the easiest way to add articulations is by selecting a single note on a staff and then advancing one note at a time to add them as needed. It would be very efficient in highly concerted passages to do this on multiple parts/staves at once.
Thanks, yes, but that still requires having to grab the mouse, and only works efficiently if the part that is pasted into is essentially the same throughout as the source. The small variations that occur from one part to the next often require removing or adjusting pasted slurs, etc.
…are likely the reason your multiple-note advancement method will also fail.
Not necessarily. I could imagine a functionality in which the selection advances to the next articulated note(s) in any part while holding the selection in other staves that might have longer note values or rests.
In many cases you can do this kind of thing with right arrow (next note) and Shift-down arrow (select more staves). You can Shift-right arrow to extend the selection to the right (but this can over-select when there are items with duration such as slurs and hairpins).
Hi Mark,
Shift-down-arrow is a good idea, especially when only two staves are involved. I do think the option of multiple-staff advancing/selection would be a helpful addition.
If we had the option of using the keyboard shortcuts to add articulations to existing notes during note input with the carat, we could then use the shift-down-arrow option to engage note input on multiple staves and add articulations from there. That would do it!