3.7. Use Sections

Use Sections

Adding a section

One-liner: in the Project UI select the Score node, then click Create element in the toolbar.

Explanation:

As denoted by the dedicated article on project hierarchy, Section nodes are direct children of the (unique) Score node; therefore, invoking element creation on a Score node results in appending a new Section node to that score.

Sections are primarily meant to be addressable regions of the score. If you set a specific section as the output of a generator, that section will be filled with the musical content produced by the generator. But sections also let you:

• organize the score (as, by default, each section ends with a double bar);
• easily reshape your piece (via nudging);
• process larger areas in one go (e.g., you could apply the Transpose macro to an entire section).

Note: at least one Section is needed for adding music to your project.

Naming or renaming a section

One-liner: click desired section's name in the Score; enter a valid and unique name in the Editor.

Explanation:

MAIDENS uses sections' names to query them internally. This is why there cannot be sections without names, nor can be any two sections that have the same name. This is also the reason why some non alpha-numeric chars (e.g., :?<>) cannot be typed in section names.

Note: as section names are required and must be unique at any given time, you might find it hard at times to swap two section names (e.g., swap the names "Choral A" and "Choral B").

To overcome this limitation, use a temporary prefix (e.g., change "Choral A" to "_Choral A"). This will then let you change "_Choral A" to "_Choral B", then change existing "Choral B" to "Choral A", and finally, change "_Choral B" to "Choral B" (i.e., in the end you finally remove the prefix).

Moving a section

One-liner: click desired section's name in the Score; click one of the Nudge... buttons in the Toolbar.

Explanation:

The Section node is a nudgeable element, and therefore can be moved around using the Nudge element before and Nudge element after buttons. See their respective sections in the Toolbar UI article for more details.

Deleting a section

One-liner: in the Score, right-click a section name and select Delete Section.

Explanation:

You use the default node removal mechanism for deleting sections of a score. See Editing the Score for more details.

Nota bene: before deleting a section, you should make sure that there is currently no generator set to write music to that section. If there is, reroute that generator's Output connections prior to deletion, or otherwise unexpected behavior may occur.

See articles on the Generator Node and Section Node for more details.