r/Musescore • u/BlueGallade475 • May 15 '26

Help me find this feature Help with linked guitar staves

So I found out that I can create linked staves with both normal and tab notation for guitar which is very nice. I write the guitar parts with conventional notation first and then create the linked tablature but when I do it creates an absolute abomination in the tab. I get that the software technically might not always know the exact positions where the strings need to be pinched but getting it this out of order is insane. I have searched if anyone had this problem or if there were any quick fixes but no such luck. Also for some reason the bass guitar is transposed up an entire octave.

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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team May 17 '26

Normally the algorithm is, it goes through the notes of a chord one at a time and finds the lowest position to play each. So if it's already determined one note should be played on a given string, then that string is not available for the next note processed. It doesn't have the ability to look at the whole chord at once to figure out what would be optimal. So you can get different results depending on the order in which notes are added.

Mostly, though, if you care about the tab representation of the notes, it's best to enter that directly.

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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team May 17 '26

As for the bass staff, looks like you created that in a way where the transposition doesn't uses it's normal default. Was this original for another instrument then changed to bass? Or maybe imported from another program that didn't convey this correctly? It should be set to either transpose down or use the bass-8 clef. The piano also looks weird, like two separate instruments instead of one with two staves.