Single-click model in percussion panel makes it difficult to enter "chords" or override default voice

[MarcSabatella]

Issue type

UX/Interaction bug (incorrect behaviour)

Description with steps to reproduce

As far as I can tell, the following two things are regressions in the Percussion panel as compared to the original palette:

1. Building a "chord" of multiple drum notes (eg, snare and tom together) is not possible using the mouse - only using Shift+letter
2. Adding a drum note into a non-default voice (eg, bass drum into voice 1, just for one passage) is not possible at all, mouse or keyboard. Not directly anyhow (there are hard-to-discover hacks to eventually get the desired result).

Maybe I'm wrong and these things are possible and I just haven't figured out how. if so, great. But assuming they have fallen through the cracks, I'd like to propose solutions so that people don't have to resort to disabling the new panel - as I fear many well if these aren't addressed before release.

For the "chord" issue, the obvious solution is that holding Shift while clicking a pad should add the note to the currently-selected note in the score to form a chord. This is the way it has always worked for double-click, and it's also the way the piano keyboard works. No reason it can't work that way for the new panel. We could also consider having it so that moving the cursor back to the first note and then clicking a pad would add to chord instead of replacing, unless you press Shift - way it has always worked in the past when clicking in the score (other than the brief failed experiment in single-click input).

For the voice issue, my somewhat radical proposal is that we do away with the whole automatic voice assignment and just honor the voice selection on the toolbar. For users who really want to keep that, we could still offer the option of selecting a default voice for in the drumset editor, but we could also have an "auto" setting that the predefined notes would use, and this would simply obey the voice selection like pitched instruments. It's kind of a big change, but there would be no better time to try it. Worst case, if we implement the auto option and some people don't like it, we could still provide it but revert the default drumset definition to use the explicit voices as they always have.

Supporting files, videos and screenshots

To be clear, this is the sort of passage that people might want to enter. Pretty simple to do in 4.4.4 and earlier, but if there is a way to accomplish this using the new drum panel, I haven't found it:

What is the latest version of MuseScore Studio where this issue is present?

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm), Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore Studio version (64-bit): 4.5.0-250440303, revision: github-musescore-musescore-0cfc821

Regression

Yes, this works in the latest released version and is broken in the nightly builds

Operating system

Debian 12

Additional context

The idea of using a single click in the panel to enter percussion notes makes perfect sense on the surface, and that's why this was tried back in 3.4. But users rightly pointed out that it came at a very high cost in that certain operations that were easy in the old two-click system became difficult to impossible in the new. There was quite a little firestorm of complaints on the forum and issue tracker - see for instance https://musescore.org/en/node/300139, https://musescore.org/en/node/300314 but probably a dozen other threads too. So the change was pretty quickly reverted, and we went back to the two-click model (either click palette then click score, or double-click palette) that we had always had before and have had since.

I've been playing with the Percussion panel trying to get a feel for how it works and whether the various complaints we got in our first attempt to implement a single-click mode might apply to the current Percussion panel. The existence of the preview mode gets rid of one big complaint, so that's good. But the issues of building chords and of overriding the default voice seem to still be major regressions.

Still, the single-click model does make sense, and I certainly don't want to see us - or users - abandon it. I'd much rather see us find solutions for its limitations.

Checklist

• This report follows the guidelines for reporting bugs and issues
• I have verified that this issue has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar issues
• I have attached all requested files and information to this report
• I have attempted to identify the root problem as concisely as possible, and have used minimal reproducible examples where possible

[mathesoncalum]

I actually have a solution ready for point 1 - will be opening a PR for it in the morning.

Point 2 would need a touch of design (@zacjansheski @bkunda FYI)

[MarcSabatella]

Glad to hear it! From my perspective, the first point is the more serious issue, since it's incredibly common to want to show snare+tom or snare+ride, etc.

For point 2, it's actually not quite as bad as it might seem. Most of the cases where people want to override a voice assignment is for the exact example I mention: bass drum in voice 1 instead of 2. But then, most of those cases are actually situations where it would be a chord with snare. So assuming the solution to point 1 includes being able to add a bass drum to a snare drum with both notes ending up in voice 1 (like "B Shift+A" already does), that goes part way to addressing point 2. And FWIW, building such snare+bass chord (with keyboard) and then deleting the snare is exactly how I hacked my example.

I do rather like my "radical suggestion" for point 2 - just doing away with the default voice assignment and treating voices the way they are treated everywhere else. But I suspect it would be more controversial. Unfortunately, I don't have any better ideas on how solve the voice problem.

[Fourniture]

Something that concerns both points 1 and 2 is a hit with both sticks, which is often notated as two voices on the same note (a double stemmed note).

[zacjansheski]

Issue is resolved by #26498

Feet in voice two, stems down, will remain the default. We are committed to this, it produces best results for the vast majority of drum kit music. We can continue to improve the experience of switching to voice 1 when that is desired.