Sheet Music Editor – Lyrics

Cubase
1

The song lyric input is not satisfactory or I don’t understand it yet.
After entering the text, it gets completely mixed up if you add or delete notes. I couldn’t clean this up without deleting all the text and retyping it word by word.
Is there a way to store and edit the entire text pre-formatted (with spaces, hyphens, commas and periods)?
For example, if half a note is changed to two quarters, a hyphen or space would have to be inserted in the overall text.
Is the score editor actually still unfinished or have I not yet understood how to use it properly?

2

I understand that the new Score Editor (C14) is certainly a work in progress. Lots of fixes coming. Also … hopefully a manual?

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3

Lyrics need to be at the same positions as notes so that they are spaced correctly. It’s generally much easier to set the rhythm of the melody before adding lyrics. There are a couple of things that can help with this (I think they should be in 14.0.10 – if not then they will be in the next update).

Create your lyrics in a text editor with hyphens for syllable breaks:

These are lyr-ics from my beau-ti-ful song.

then you can paste these into the score in two ways:

  • Select a note then do Score > Lyrics from clipboard: this will paste everything in the clipboard at each of the note positions, split by syllables
  • Select the text > lyric button in the symbol palette and click in the score to start editing. Ctrl-V / Cmd-V will paste the next syllable from the clipboard and advance to the next note. This gives you much more control over the rhythm and melismas.
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4

Wonderful! Thanks!

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5

I noticed the hyphens are not included in the lyrics in the exported midi - could this be added?

This is an issue because there is a difference between “snow-man” as two syllables of the word snowman, and two words in a different context, “snow” and “man”. So I would expect to see a midi message with “snow-” and another with “man” otherwise the information is lost.

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6

We follow the MIDI.org Recommended Procedure RP17 for exporting lyrics where word endings have trailing spaces and syllables don’t. We do include explicit hyphens in the MIDI export. I’ve just exported a file containing lyrics with an explicit hyphen, then re-imported it and it appears to preserve the syllables and the explicit hyphen.

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7

Ahh great, thank you for clarifying. My bad, I was using a software library to read the output that doesn’t re-apply the hyphen. That makes the score editor even more useful as I can properly use it in the way I want for lyrics now! Cheers

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