Songbook of laurelin
There is an outstanding feature request to add this: the ability to have different clefs for concert pitch versus transposed.Īnyhow, that's some of the "why" things are as they are. You want concert scores to use a clef that makes the part readable, but you want the transposed score/part to be in the right key and use the appropriate clef. This is especially important for instruments that transpose at the ninth, like tenor sax, or other intervals larger than the octave. It would be better, I suppose, if you could set up MuseScore to use bass-8 for concert pitch but then switch to regular bass clef, with octave transposition, when you turned concert pitch off.
SONGBOOK OF LAURELIN SOFTWARE
When I look at scores produced in the past 25 years or so (since computer-based notation software became available to the masses), it's pretty common to see it done this way. The bass-8 clef is a clever way to make the bass part readable at concert pitch, and then, since that puts all the notes exactly where they need to be in the transposed score or parts, it's just as easy to simply leave the bass-8 clef in there and not mess with transposition. If you set up bass to be a transposing instrument using ordinary bass clef, the downside is that it is very difficult to read or writre bass at concert pitch - too many ledger lines below the staff.
I think that's primarily because notation software makes this an easy way of doing things. Regarding bass specifically, it should be noted that the convention of using the bass-8 clef with no transposition is pretty common these days. FWIW, this is one of the reasons I have argued elsewhere that the score creation wizard should provide easy access to the staff properties - so one doesn't have to go in afterwards and clean things up.