Guitar bends

• Dec 16, 2014 - 03:23

I don't play guitar but I have a cool lick in my head and I want to get it onto paper. It involves a guitar bend. I do not know how to notate this but I'm sure there is a way to do so in MuseScore 2.0. This has probably already been covered but I couldn't find anything about it. Can someone please post step-by-step instructions as to how to bend a guitar note? Much appreciated!


Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Changing pitch is not exactly a "nuance". Half and full step bends are very common, which means that there are lots of wrong notes when importing GP files.

At least MS could interpret those notes sonically as the "destination" note.. or start on the written note and quickly change to the bent note.

A full bend of a C note is a D even though the dot on the staff is on the C.

edit: For non guitar players who might think this is a minor thing, imagine listening to musescore's playback ignoring all accidentals you put in...

In reply to by iursnitram

Bends are not anything like accidentals. They are simply a form of ornament, like a trill or turn or a mordent. MuseScore has only very limited support for ornament playback - more than 1.3, but still far from complete. And the nature of bends means that a proper implementation would actually be very much harder than what is done for mordents or grace notes (the two main ornaments that *do* play back).

Anyhow, as I said, the primary purpose of MsueScore is notation, not playback. If the automatic playback does not suit your needs with respect to playback of bends and other ornaments, you are free to add invisible notes in other voices to simulate the ornament you want, or export to MIDI and use a program whose main purpose *is* playback to tweak the results.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Bends are not ornaments. They might be visually but that's all.

Although the black dot is on the starting note, the note that matters from a listening point of view (maybe not immediately) is the one where the bend arrives. The written note can be thought of as the fret where you pluck the string but the note you want to hear shortly after until the end of the duration of the note is the higher pitched one.

Just try importing any Steve Vai guitar pro tab and listen to the mess. Everything would be nice and consonant if the notes played were the higher pitched ones (where it's supposed to bend to).

In reply to by iursnitram

Not just visually. I don't know what your working definition of "ornament" is, but mine is something like this: "a symbol you place in a score as a shorthand for something that would be time- or space-consuming to write out in standard notation". What you've describe fits that definition just fine. The fact that a pitch other than the notated one *sometimes* happens to be more musically significant doesn't change anything that I can see. And it's still the case that, as I said, if you really need to hear both pitches, then you can simply enter both pitches, using hidden voices or whatever.

Anyhow, regarding what happens when you import something and "listen" to it - see my original comment that I then repeated regarding the primary purpose of MuseScore. And once again, none of this is to say that MuseScore will *never* support playback of bends or other ornaments or other notations that currently don't playback (eg, slurs). Just explaining why it isn't there yet. It's simply not the priority.

I can relate to this an too be honest even the visual representation of bends could be worked on, but how I do it, if the guitar I'm working on needs this much attention, is I create a part for sound, which thanks too musescore 2.0, can be ommited from the visual score without making an extra part. Though the playback of musescore does not use a pitch wheel, you can still get the approximate sound with this hidden staff. I also create two more staffs, unlinked, for notation and tab, the notation tab just shows a grace note or gliss. showing the exact be of a note, while the tab just has one note with ties where bending and releasing need to be shown, hope that helps.

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