Tremolo Play Option

• Oct 29, 2020 - 18:07

While my interpretation of a tremolo as an "effect" SIMILAR to an ornament may be up for challenge, I think that there should be an option to not play the tremolo like there is for trills, mordents, etc. In my mind, not playing the tremolo but instead, playing back the notes OF the tremolo should be an option.

The best way I can explain it is to offer a representative score on a website and have you play it back via the website's playback feature:

https://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0085827

I am in the process of recreating essentially the same version of this piano version in MuseScore, however when I add the tremolo scoring, it plays back "differently", in other words it plays back the tremolo.

Am I missing something?

I guess I also don't understand why the playback on the website is NOT playing the tremolo...

Why score the tremolo if I don't want to PLAY the tremolo? I guess I just want my "copy" to be an exact copy even though it is a version for just the treble clef.

Thanks!


Comments

You can uncheck play for the first note which will silence the whole thing.
Then perhaps add the notes you do wish to play in another voice and make them invisible.

I VERY strongly advise AGAINST this
It is a very bad idea to reproduce the effect of a bug of some website in your playback. It is not the intended playback of that notation and it shouldn't be.

If you really want that end result, then don't notate the tremolo, but notate the actual playback noted and place an editorial note to explain why you changed the score.

You wrote:
I guess I also don't understand why the playback on the website is NOT playing the tremolo...

An irrelevant concern here at MuseScore, best to ask over there.

Also:
Why score the tremolo if I don't want to PLAY the tremolo?

You don't have to play it. When you encounter it, ignore it. ;-)

Finally:
I guess I just want my "copy" to be an exact copy even though it is a version for just the treble clef.

So it's not an exact copy then. Since it's not an exact copy, leave out the tremolo.

I think it's a laudable goal to aim for an exact copy of the notation, which looks good. But, to be clear: that reallyis a tremolo. Their software is buggy and doesn't know how to play it back properly, but you dshouldn't limit yourself to the same bug, instead, be glad your playback will be correct where theirs isn't.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The biggest issue for me was a transcription of the score for an instrument which cannot play the tremolo easily, cleanly or in tempo without some instrument "trickery."

I resolved my issue by creating two versions of the score, one as written with the tremolo for posterity and another with a split staff for the first three systems that score it with two dotted quarter notes and no tremolo.

Maybe it's not "exact," but I am working from a piano score to create a "single note" version and doing this way makes it playable; it sounds good (at least to me) and helped me to understand how to do the split staff thing for limited measures which will come in handy for other transcriptions where optional additional voicings can get messy looking on a single staff.

Thanks all for the replies!

In reply to by HuffNPuff

The thing is tremolos in a piano score are often "trickery" that allows a piano to simulate sustained chords that might be played by a string section for example. When transcribing such tremolos, sustained chords for an instrument like an organ or an ensemble that can actually sustain them may be truer to the composer's intent.

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