can musescore honor legato / slur markings on playback?

• Jun 3, 2020 - 13:25

If so, how?


Comments

Unfortunately MIDI doesn't provide a great / standard way to do this, just some various a collection of techniques that work differently from platform to platform. But for MuseScore 4, there is a plan to move to some new synthesizer schemes that could potentially open the door to this.

In reply to by Jack A. Zucker

I have no idea how long it will be before there is anything to test as far as that goes, but I do have some idea for workarounds. They would be some work, but if just a few examples here or ther,e it could be viable. Or potentially a plugin could be written to try to automate some of this.

For sounds that support single note dynamics - unfortunately guitar isn't currently one of them - you can add an invisible dynamic to the notes you want slurred and set it to a quieter initial attack then a fast crescendo. It's kind of sort of convincing when I try with an alto sax, going from normal default (velocity 80) to a note set to 40 velocity with a +40 fast change. For guitar, you won't get the crescendo, it will just be quieter. But maybe you could finesse that to work well enough? Or just tweak the velocities directly. Or find or help develop a soundfont that does support single note dynamics for guitar.

Another method would be to find a soundfont that supports a slurred guitar sound, then set up your instrument in the Mixer to use that sound for one of the alternate channels. Then can switch back and forth with a staff text. And again, perhaps a plugin could add those staff texts for every slur.

Perhaps also it would be possible to add invisible pedal marks to accompany the slurs, then find either a soundfont (SFZ format might support this?) or an external synth that could be configured to interpret those as slurs. Actually, depending on the context the pedal might even sort of sound a little like a slur as it is, depends on how convincing you need this to be. Really, if it's a technique demonstration specifically (as opposed to theory), I'd seriously consider just recording the examples yourself, but easier said than done of course, especially if there are tons of them.

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