
These modifiers come after the separator.

Note that minor chord names, indicated by m, are one of the available chord modifiers.

Below are some chords that appear in a song. Here, the syntax used to specify chords for chord diagrams is introduced. These chord diagram specifications are passed to score, discussed in the next section that brings together the overall process of moving from phrases to tracks to a score. MuseScore doesn’t really provide a perfect solution to this problem, pointing to the fact that it’s primarily a score editor and not a score player.Chord diagrams refer to the fretboard diagrams commonly displayed in sheet music written for guitar. Note that these X notes do make sound as E2 during audio playback, although they’re at least low enough to not be overly distracting. In the standard staff, select the corresponding note heads and set “Head group: Cross” in the Inspector pane.Hold down Ctrl, select those 0’s, and hit Shift+X to display them as X’s.Dragging a glissando to the tab staff (as opposed to the standard staff) will produce a clean line without the unnecessary “gliss.” text. Both marks are available in the “Palettes” pane. I use a straight glissando for slower slides and an appoggiatura for faster slides. On the starting note of each hammer-on/pull-off, hit s to create a slur to the next note.Hit v to toggle all selected ties’ visibility to invisible.Right-click a tie (if any exist) in your tab staff and choose “Select” > “All Similar Elements in Same Staff”.Complete all aspects of your tab except for hammer-ons/pull-offs.Since slurs are visually similar to ties, you’ll want to hide all ties in the tab staff first. Since MuseScore is intended as a general-purpose score editor for all instruments, expressing guitar-specific performance techniques sometimes takes a little creativity. Note that by the end of step 3, your tab staff is already 99% done! You can just consider your score finished at that point if you don’t care about the standard staff. Repeat step 3 for voices (and then for note values, then for articulations, etc.).Starting back at the first measure, use your computer’s numpad and arrow keys to enter all of the song’s note pitches into the tab staff as eighth notes.Create several dozen new measures and copy the first measure’s rests into them.Fill the first measure with eighth rests.In the “Note Values” tab, select “Shown as: None”Ī natural way to write your score might be to fully complete each measure before moving on to the next one, but unfortunately this is probably the slowest and most annoying way.Ī much faster method is to write your score one layer at a time:.Right-click the tab staff and select “Staff/Part Properties”.

Keeping note values and ties confined to the standard staff results in a cleaner tab staff. I find MuseScore’s default tab style pretty noisy and hard to read. The default choice of LilyPond’s Emmentaler works fine, but I prefer heavier fonts for legibility. In “Format” > “Style” > “Score”, set the music symbols font to Bravura.

LILYPOND TIES AND CHORDS PRO
After brief forays into LilyPond and TuxGuitar (and a failed attempt at running Guitar Pro in Wine), I’ve settled on MuseScore for my guitar tabbing needs.
