Visualizing chord structure in SATB choral music

2003-12-17 11:34 pm

If you write SATB choral music and have difficulty visualizing the chords, try this:

Place each voice on a staff that has the treble clef. For the male voices, set the clef properties as octave down.

If you already have a voice on the bass clef, you can change it to treble easily enough. Just select all the notes on a bass staff, then CTRL+SHIFT+cursor down 5 times, then change to treble clef, with octave down.

For either Soprano and Alto staves, or the Tenor and Bass staves, change to staff color to something distinctive. Since I use dark blue for the active staff and red for playing notes, I use green for Soprano and Alto, and leave Tenor and Bass as black.

Layer all 4 staves, so they appear as one in the editor. Now you can see the chord structure, and can also tell whether notes that appear in proximity are really an octave apart. If you play the music, it will sound correct.

When you are finished, you can un-layer staves. To change treble to bass staff, simply select all notes, CTRL+SHIFT+cursor up 5 times, then change to bass clef.

Re: Visualizing chord structure in SATB choral music

Reply #1 – 2003-12-22 08:29 pm

Thanks Robert!
Typically a good candidate for a macro recorder

Note: if there is no extra staff (in particular layered staff), then you can set the layered property "On" on the 3 top staves. Then de/activating the layering property is just made by clicking on the matching checkbox in the score properties.