Damping individual strings

• Apr 13, 2020 - 19:13

Hello,

I play a traditional wire strung harp. The brass wires ring for sometime and have to be damped to reduce dissonance. I'm struggling to find an efficient way to mark individual strings for damping (something like a cross just after or before a note).

I tried grace notes with different heads and unchecked 'play' in the inspector, but they interfered with the playback by cutting the previous note short.
Next, I tried the same thing but with normal notes, repositioning them with the 'mirror head' drop down menu and offsetting on the x axis. These look okay and don't interfere with the playback, but it's a lot of work each time. After a little reading I thought I could solve this adding one to a custom palette, as per the handbook:

'To add customized elements from a score:
Press and hold Ctrl+Shift (Mac: Cmd+Shift) and drag the element from the score into a palette in the custom workspace.'

Unfortunately, it just doesn't seem to work. I'm using Cmd+Shift on my MacBook, but the notes just slide up and down the stave, and can't be dragged towards the palette.
If anyone knows how to make this work, or has a completely different solution, I'd be very grateful for your advice.


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

Yes, I've actually just been playing with that, but I'm finding it clumsy. I still have to add each note and then reformat and reposition it. I'm also finding that the extra notes indicating damping are disrupting the spacing of the actual notes.

In reply to by Shoichi

Thanks again Shoichi for another good idea. Unfortunately because the text placement is automatically above or below, I would have to manually drag each symbol to its rightful place. I assume these are for modern harp techniques, which don't tend to indicate the damping of individual notes (as is common on a wire strung harp), which is why they wouldn't need to snap to the stave. Ideally I'd be looking for something that does. Maybe I'm asking for too much!

I have found that adding a hidden note to a second voice and attaching grace notes onto that works well. There's no disruption to the playback and it doesn't mess up the spacing, so long as I put the note in the right place. It is, however, still very time consuming. It's a shame (for me) that a grace note can't be moved to a different voice without the main note.

In reply to by OCham

Workaround: A bit of preparatory work, notes of Voice 4 without stem and with modified head. One for each pitch needed;
Image capture (example in the lower stave) for each;
Saved in the palette (Fingering).
Selecting a note and clicking from the palette should connect the image, although repositioning is necessary.

20041401.png

I don't have anything better for now, but underquark may arrive...

Attachment Size
OCham.mscz 17.08 KB

In reply to by Shoichi

Thanks Shoichi, that’s a work around I would never have come up with by myself. As you say, it requires a little prep, but it seems easier than the other things I’ve been trying.
Do you think it would be worth requesting this as a feature for the future? I’m guessing it must be a rather niche requirement...

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