Minor Notation Improvement Suggestions

• Oct 17, 2020 - 08:51

Since I've dived into the world of improvisational and aleatoric music for chamber ensembles, my workarounds for contemporary and untraditional notation techniques have increased tenfold!

I bracket rests with parenthesis to indicate them as optional; I think the use case is rather low but I don't think it would hurt to have a dedicated bracket function for rests like we have for accidentals. Do the same with hairpins? I'd rather not go to the Symbols palette every time and toggle each individual parenthesis. Although noteheads have a dedicated parenthesis option, why do I have to go to the Noteheads palette...

I put boxes around suggested pitches or aleatoric motifs; for now I use custom whitespace rehearsal text with rectangular borders but maybe one day we can have a more elegant solution?

Hanging slurs/ties (for l.r. l.v. functions). I literally hand-adjust each hanging slur and tie at a fixed zoom setting until the five UI edit boxes line up. And they change whenever the measure or rhythm proportions change. I know we have a form of this in the Articulations palette but I have yet to see scores with a hanging slur above the notehead rather than hanging off or to one.

Alright, time for me to go back and not write random notes...


Comments

I agree that parentheses should be available for pretty much everything, they are used for things other than aleatoric music. Perhaps a S5-suggestion in https://musescore.org/en/node/add/project_issue?pid=1236 is meritted.

For hairpins, you can edit the start and end text in the inspector to add the appropriate ) or ( symbols. If you use the hairpin enough this way you can put it into a palette for later use. hold ctrl+shift then drag it to a palette from the score. Slurs are not hairpins so this doesn't work and nothing in the articulations an ornaments palettes allow for this :(

As for lining up the hanging L.V., a common workaround it to use a grace note after and tie the main note to it. You can made grace note chords if needed, add a grace note, select it and add to the chord with the same shortcuts you use for regular notes. I recently start selecting the grace note after and turning it into a whole note so I don't have to select each noteheads, the stem and the flag to make them invisible rather I just make the noteheads invisible.

In reply to by mike320

Hmmm, I did not discover the Cntrl + Shift + drag feature to save a custom element onto a palette or to duplicate it (a red "not allowed" sign appears when I try to do that for some other elements besides hairpins). I'll definitely take advantage of the begin/end text as you suggested.
I've seen and tried the l.v. workaround with grace notes and the only thing that stops me from adopting it is that the slur/tie lengths are inconsistent as the distance between the main note and the grace note can change according to the stretching of the measure; I'd still be meticulously shaping them to be consistent. I just put a slur to the next rest and that works well most of the time (not so much for parts though). How do other notation programs deal with this?

In reply to by Quinn Ouyang

There is nothing in the first measure to put more space between the note and the rest like there is in the second measure. If you changed the notes in the top staff of the second measure to 64th notes, they would make more space than there is now. From one measure to another they are different all the time in printed scores. Within the same measure they are very consistent and MuseScore does this.

In reply to by mike320

I thought the convention is that hanging slurs/ties stay the same across measure, but if not then the ties are fine as they are consistent within the same measure as the entire measure scales together. Maybe I'll peruse some scores to see if this is the case.

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