Hello! My name is Marc Sabatella, and I'm a new member here. I've been doing some work on MuseScore, improving the chord symbol support.
What brings me here right now is the desire to get feedback on the best way to represent markings like "N.C." (no chord). These should be rendered exactly like other chord symbols - same font, same height above staff - but there is no really semantics to attach. Seems they should be
"harmony" objects with a kind of none and text of "N.C.", but with no root at all. A harmony element with no root doesn't seem to be legal, however. It appears other programs don't necessarily handle "N.C." consistently or very well either. Is there a recommended best practice here? Right now, MuseScore exports this as ordinary text (a "words" element), which tends to not render anything like harmony elements by default.
Also - I can't find a way to respond directly to a message sent before I joined, but I saw with interest the recent discussion on use of "/" to indicate a repeated chord, as in
| A \ \ \ |
There is actually a more general case to consider: slashes used to show a change of bass note without a change of chord. For example:
| A \G# \G \F# |
This is a shorthand for
A A\G# A\G A\F#
The slash retains its ordinary meaning of separating root and bass, but the root is implied.
So really, the slash character in either context means exactly what the slash always means in a chord symbol, but if the part before (root) or after (bass) the slash is missing, it simply means, repeat the most recent root or bass note.
Marc
