Add support for scordatura in music for violin family

• Jun 18, 2020 - 12:02

In scordatura the strings are tuned differently from normal, but as violinists don't use tab the notation has to be altered - it may look odd on the page but when played as if in regular tuning the music sounds correct. It is not common but has been used historically, usually to change resonances. It is also used in modern music, sometimes to enable particular chords.

Altering the notation manually is a chore and it is easy to get confused and make mistakes. It is already possible in Musescore to have custom tunings for guitars. Could the same be done for the bowed strings?

This is already available for guitar tab - linked staves where the notes can be entered in standard notation and appears in tab according to the tuning of the strings. The string pitches can be edited and the tab changes accordingly. In tab, 0 is the open string and 1,2,3 etc go up in semitones. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard it would be to adapt this method for bowed strings.

I envisage using linked staves, so that the actual sound of the notes can be entered on the standard one and appear simultaneously adapted on the scordatura one. Playback would be from the standard staff but the player would play from the scordatura staff.

Thanks for reading!


Comments

Once upon a time we had tablatur enabled for (bowed) strings too, including the needed string data (number and tuning of strings, number of frets).
As these instruments really don't have frets and tablature notation is... unusal?, it got removed

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Interesting - that suggest to me if not to you that my scordatura suggestion would be possible. Music for Lyra viol (fretted and bowed) uses tab - I see that is already in the listed instruments. The viola d'amore isn't - it doesn't have frets and uses scordatura in various tunings.

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