rit. and accelerando

• Mar 7, 2011 - 00:07

musescore needs rit. (i don't know how to spell the whole thing) and accelerando (i mean like the rit. where it means means to slow down to a slower speed)

Comments

• Mar 7, 2011 - 00:33

This can be done by selecting the desired note and entering your ritardando or accelerando as text over/under the note. The only downside with MuseScore on this aspect is that entering such things in do not have any effect on playback. However, this is understandable when one realizes that you could legitimately input many different things in there to define the music (ie. piu mosso, rubato, accelerando, tranquillo). All describe how the music ought to be played, however, to teach a software to recognize and accurately play back virtually anything you could write in, well, it speaks for itself...

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• Feb 3, 2021 - 19:58

You don't need to "teach" software to recognize "virtually anything" only things that it probably should recognize. "rit." is ubiquitous, and not difficult to define programmatically (which the plugin does, technically). If you type "rit." into an expression field in Finale, it recognizes it and slows down the playback gradually, then somewhere later you type "a tempo" it returns to the original, as you might expect. If you type "ad libitum" it doesn't do anything. But there's no reason why it couldn't recognize "ad libitum", just let the user define the tempo changes similar to how the plugin does it.

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• Sep 22, 2021 - 20:48

FWIW, the coding would indeed be relatively simple, but defining the UI for how the dialog should look - what kind of controls it should contains regard to the curves etc - is the trickier part. There was a partial design done for this as part of the Google Summer of Code this year. Not sure how far it progressed though.

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 02:14

If you really want to hear a ritardando or accelerando in MuseScore, you can do a workaround to make it happen. Whenever you want a ritarardando for example, select a note at the beginning of the retard, then put in a tempo text and set the speed to be a little slower than the established tempo. Then select another note a few down (depending on how long your ritard is), add another tempo text that's slower, and keep repeating the process to get the speed down. You can then set those extra tempos to invisible so they don't show up in printing or even on the screen if you uncheck "Show Invisible." Accelerandos can be achieved the same way.

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 14:20

This is a few measures of example of how I created a ritardando at the end using tempo text. It's not ideal, but it does give me lots of flexibility in creating the ritard. I intentionally left the tempo texts visible so you could see them, but I would right-click on the them and set them to invisible before printing.

The speeds are:
Moderato (beginning) is 112
Andante is 96
Maestoso is 72
Ballad is 60
Grave is 48

Attachment Size
RitardandoExample.mscz 3.66 KB

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 21:09

windows is not letting me open your file it says it needs to find the appropriate program to open it....but your'e not the only one i'm trying to solve this issue with another song i'm trying to download...but thanks for the explanation anyway

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 21:45

So just save the file and then open it directly from MuseScore. But it sounds like you also need to tell Windows to use MuseScore to open mscz files by default. The dialog that comes up asking you what program you want to use hould provide that option, or if not you get it by right clicking an mscz file form Windows Explorer and choosing "open with..." and then "choose default program". At least, those are the steps on Vista.

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 23:53

I would also try the second method i mentioned (right clicking from Explorer). If you can't get that to work, though, you might try a general Windows forum - this really isn't MuseScore-specific. Still, even without that, you should be able to pen it directly from MuseScore. Just do File->Open then browse to the folder where you saved it to. That assumes, of course, that you know where you saved it to, but presumably whatever browser you use gives you the option to save files wherever you want.

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• Dec 3, 2015 - 23:36

a better alternative than THAT. I do what you said, with the diminishing tempos, but I then double-click the tempo text, and backspace it totally. The tempo still changes, but you don't see the text. you can make the "rit." or "accel." on the bottom if you wish also.

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• Dec 4, 2015 - 00:41

Hmm, what version of MuseScore are you using? In the current version (2.0.2) deleting all the text from a tempo marking also deletes the tempo marking itself. But markings - text and otherwise - can be hidden by simply pressing "V". They will appear greyed out on screen unless you turn off the View / Show Invisible, but they won't print in any case.

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• Mar 8, 2011 - 04:03

I was looking for retardando yesterday! If/when you want to implement it, I think there are four key points that need to be taken into account:
- start point of rit
- end point of rit
- speed at end
(- speed at beginning is already known)

But again, thanks for a fantastic piece of software nonetheless!

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• Dec 20, 2013 - 19:00

Select to create text, tempo while a note is selected, choose a tempo that you would not use during the piece. You can set it to any bpm you would like, and then delete the name. When you choose "ok" you assign that tempo to the note and those that follow, but you add no text to the score. Score!
Then I repeated the procedure each measure with a smaller bpm. It wasn't a smooth ritard, but it sufficed.

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