Fermata or caesura?

• Feb 23, 2015 - 03:23

Hello,

I'm trying to put a pause in the middle of a piece of music. I have entered a fermata over a rest, with no effect. I looked for a way to enter a caesura, but found none.

Option 1: Please give the user caesura capability.
or
Option 2: Please allow the user to set duration for a fermata.
or
Option 3: Tell me it's already been done, and I overlooked it.

Thank you!

Ted Shoemaker

Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
most recent nightly build: MuseScoreNightly-2015-02-22-1811-fa50560.7z


Comments

I choose Option 3. The caesura can be found under the "Breaths & Pauses" palette on the left (if you don't see that palette, switch from "Basic" to "Advanced" at the bottom.) Glad I could help! ;-)

Unfortunately while both the fermata and the caesura play, the latter has no effect in MIDI exports. I suppose a messy way around this would be to shorten the note to put in a rest, and do a tempo change on the rest and the note after it.

In reply to by LuuBluum

What I mean by "play" is that when you are playing in MuseScore, the playback responds, by holding the note/rest for a fermata (if you have stretched the time duration as you say) or inserting a pause for a caesura. My point is that when you export to MIDI, the hold for the fermata is honoured, whereas the pause for the caesura is ignored.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

No it isn't - it works fine on my version (2.something Linux - don't have the machine to hand at the moment). The pause it produces is more than discernible - if anything it's rather self-indulgent!

That bug report appears to be for MuseScore version 1.

In reply to by ukuser

The bug or problem with caesuras may have changed between 1.x and 2.0, but both have a problem. A score created afresh with 2.0 dosn't pause at all at a breath or caesura, a score imported from an earlier version might, and there is nothing that could be done by a 'mere mortal' user to change this, short of editing ther uncompressed mscz file with a plain text editor to alter/add/delete the length of these pauses, the UI for this is simply missing.

Edit: wrong, caesuras do pause, but breaths don't. Still neihter can be influenced via the UI

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

With my instance of Musecore 2, I can assure you that a caesura causes a pause in playback (though not MIDI export) with a score created with that software. If I were at the machine I could attach a piece of audio to demonstrate this. It looks like there is a bug that doesn't affect everyone - perhaps it's score-dependent? There is no UI parameter to adjust the caesura unfortunately - the pause length is fixed and as I say, to my taste rather long. It appears to be the same for both varieties of caesura.

Breath has no effect AFAICR. As suggested elsewhere, perhaps it could shorten the previous note but it should not disrupt the tempo (ie it should fill up the space with a rest). Slurs could also be used to control note length.

It might also be worth the fermata by default doing something (the default time stretch should be greater than 1 or 0 or whatever it is). I think too many people will assume that it's just a passive piece of notation otherwise and won't realise that it can actually be made to do what it says.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Noted, thanks. Too late to edit mine. I agree it would be nice to be able to adjust the caesura and as it can be done with the fermata I guess it shouldn't be too hard - just waiting for a round tuit I imagine. (But don't make the default value "do nothing"!)

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