Arpeggios, glissandos and bears. Oh my!

• Jan 16, 2019 - 19:23

I'm interested in understanding the 'bears'. That is, the functions in the arpeggios palette such as 'fall', 'plop' and 'scoop', but haven't been able to locate a detailed description of what they do and whether there are instrument restrictions, etc. Can someone point me to an explanation? Thanks.


Comments

These are symbols commonly found in jazz and they indicate what they appear to graphically convey - a bend of pitch either up or down, before or after the note itself. In theory you could write them for any instrument, although some like piano can't bend pitch so it's kind of pointless. Currently they don't play back at all within MuseScore.

In reply to by chasbo

To be clear: they are implemented, I use them all the time, they appear in the sheet music I print out, and the musicians reading my music play them correctly. It's only the computer-generated playback that doesn't happen to also play these, but that's not unusual - plenty of other symbols that work perfectly fine (appearing the notation correctly) don't happen to playback, either.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Got it! I understand the notation is the primary focus of MuseScore and that playback is a bonus feature which will take a back seat. My problem is that I sometimes don't know if I'm misusing something or misunderstanding it. Would it be possible to right-click on a symbol or some other action to bring up a dialog which explains the symbol and its status as a functional playback symbol? That would have saved me a lot of time...

In reply to by chasbo

Not right-click, but pressing F1 while hovering your mouse over any element in your score will take you to whatever documentation exists for it. That documentation may or may not mention whether or not playback is supported, but if you have questions, just ask here.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks Marc. I suppose this next thought ought to be a feature request, but what about this?: Currently the hover hint for each symbol appears in black text. If the color of the hover text were changed to, say, red to indicate an unimplemented playback feature, it would be immediately apparent to a user whether the symbol is implemented and then when (if) it is, change the color to black. I assume these options are done in XML stylesheets or something similar and could be implemented without much trouble.

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