Tip #10 - Separating Lines in Transposed Versions of a Score

When you transpose a line of music (treble, bass, tab, or chord) you can select either "Replace" or put transposed lines above or below the original lines. If you choose above/below you'll get two versions of every line, one in the original key and one in the new key. This can be nice if you want to see both versions, but it can be awkward to use because the lines are interleaved.

It's not too hard to show just one or the other set of lines however because of a non-obvious thing which MusEdit does: it puts a label on all the newly created transposed lines based on the new key of the transposed lines. To see this label after doing a transpose, select View|Show Line Labels (Ctrl+Shift+W). The attached example shows Yesterday in C, with the transposed version in E interleaved, and with line labels visible so you can see the "E" label which MusEdit gave to all the new lines.

Now you can use View|Line Types To Show|Labeled Lines (Ctrl+Alt+L) to select which lines to show, based on their labels. The original lines were unlabeled, and the new lines have the label "E". With the "Set Labeled Lines to Be Visible" dialog open, double click on "E" and it will move to the "Lines Which Will Be Hidden" box. If you hit OK you'll only see the original lines in the key of C.

Right now you may want to hide the Text lines (hit the Show/Hide Text toolbar button) so that only the original treble lines -all in C- are visible. Select them all (Ctrl+Shift+E), then open the Label Lines dialog (Ctrl+L) and type "C". When you hit OK they should all have the label "C".

Do Ctrl+Alt+L again and notice that now the C lines are in the "Visible" box and the E lines are in the "Hidden" box. Double clicking one or the other gives you the option of which key should be visible. And if you combine this new ability with the techniques in Tip of the Day #1 you can even separate the two versions out from each other.

NOTE: If you want to practise on the attached file first select all the lines (Ctrl+Shift+E), select Options|Transpose (Ctrl+Alt+O), then make sure when you do the transposition to E that you set "Transposed Lines Should Go..." (at the bottom of the dialog) to either ABOVE or BELOW . The default is "Replace" in which case you won't be able to do any of the stuff described above!

MusEdit file to practise with: KeyOfC.med

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