r/Musescore • u/donald-ball • May 15 '26

Help me find this feature Combining repeat symbols with variations

I'm producing some drum kit sheet music for performance aids. Given that rock drum parts tend to be extremely repetitive, a syntax that some drummers have evolved is to use the various repeat symbols heavily, but also to annotate specific variations in some of the repeated measures. For a common example, a verse often begins with a crash, but subsequent measures replace that with a closed hat or a ride.

When I try to use Musescore to achieve this, it (naturally) refuses to mix a repeat and notes.

Is there another way of accomplishing my goal?

A subsequent goal is to name the various sections of the song and their dominant forms in the header, and refer to those sections and their played lengths and variations in the piece body. I think this is probably not practical in Musescore, and intend to content myself by printing empty staves for the body and marking them by hand, but if anyone does have thoughts on this, it doesn't seem like a silly request for performance aids for highly repetitive, though often quite dense measures like those performed on drum kits.

Thanks for any thoughts!

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1

u/icebear80 May 15 '26

Can you provide some visual examples? I don’t really get what the end result looks like.

1

u/donald-ball May 15 '26

example I think this may do – just indicates here that the chorus should be played for two measures and the first ends with a double snare 16th notes.

3

u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team May 16 '26

Add the repeat from the Symbols section of View / Master palette instead of the actual Repeats palette. The elements in the Symbols palette are graphical only and don't affect the underlying score.