Note duration
I am new to musescore and I am having fun writing some music.
I have a semibreve tied to a minim for a total of six beats duration in 4/4.
If this is played back by a piano, the sound duration only lasts for the duration of the whole note (four beats), not the six I expected. However, the total time taken is six beats (4 sound + 2 silence)
If I play back the same note combination as an organ I get the whole six beat duration.
If I change the time signature to 6/4 and use a dotted semibreve so I get everything in one bar, I still only get a 4 beat duration sound.
Is this expected behavior for musescore?
Comments
did you use a tie or a slur?
In reply to did you use a tie or a slur? by micrologus
seems like a very astute shot.
In reply to did you use a tie or a slur? by micrologus
Thanks for your reply Micrologus. Like I said in my original message, I used a tie.
Posting the score would help. Hard to say exactly what might be happening otherwise. I suppose if the tempo is slow enlugh, it could just be the natural decay of the sound of a piano is such that it becomes inaudible after about that long. Also if you have the same note in another staff or voice and it last only four beats, that could also be triggering the cutoff. Or maybe the note duration got changed in Note Properties (right click menu) somehow.
In reply to Posting the score would help. by Marc Sabatella
Marc, thanks for your comment.
I made a simple test score to try it out. All it is is a dotted semibreve in 4/4 time. Musescore writes this as a whole note tied to a half note in the next bar. The effect is the same as when it occurs in my full score, the piano note only lasts four beats followed by two beats of silence. It is the same if I change the time sig. to 6/4 to keep it all in one bar.
There is only one staff, so there can be no interference.
If I change the instrument to an organ, then the duration of the sound is a whole six beats, so I suspect it must be something to do with the piano sound.
When musescore plays the notes, you can see it uses the full six beats, but only sounds for four. It should be easy for anyone to try it, just make a new score, with a piano (treble clef only) with a dotted semibreve. Then play it. I am most interested to know if anyone else has the same outcome.
In reply to Marc, thanks for your by turtlevt
I tried it and it works as expected. Maybe this depends on the soundfont used?
In reply to I tried it and it works as by Jojo-Schmitz
Jojo,
thank you for trying it. You are probably right. It worked fine when I used an organ sound font, but then I thought maybe it was because an organ can sustain a note indefinitely.
I will try another sound font. May I ask as to which font you used and where I might obtain a copy?
In reply to Jojo, thank you for trying by turtlevt
You used a different instrument, ot a different soundfont.
See http://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfont, you probably use the TimGM6mb.sf2, I use FluidR3_GM.sf2
In reply to Marc, thanks for your by turtlevt
Again, posting the actual score might provides some clues. But all I can do is repeat my earlier guesses - perhaps the sound has simply decayed to the point where you can't hear it through your speakers. Computer speakers are not the best devices for judging such things. How about if you listen through headphones? A real piano of course *does* decay, and won't hold a note indefinitely. When I try to repeat your experiment using the default soundfont or FluidR3, the computer speakers do indeed get drowned out by the background noise after a few beats, but listening with headphones, it's clear the note is sustaining normally.
If anyone has some other score writing software I would love to know how it treats the dotted semibreve in terms of note duration for a piano when played.
In reply to If anyone has some other by turtlevt
As mentioned above, it's really all about your soundfont and the volume and quality of your speakers. Finale is capable of being used with a variety of different soundfonts (although they are called something different), but the default is just as with MuseScore - notes decay to the point of being hard to hear through cheap computer speakers in a noisy environment pretty quickly, but with headphones, you can hear things better. Actually, I'd say the default Finale sound decays rather *faster* than MuseScore's.
You just have to realize that pianos *do* decay, and when a recording of a piano is played back at a volume level that is quieter than the actual piano (and computer speakers will generally do that), it's going to fall below the background noise threshold pretty quickly. That's just physics.
Jojo was correct. It is affected by the sound font.
I was using yamahagrand_adcock.sf2 as my sound font. This is the one which has a duration of four beats for a six beat piano note.
I changed the font to FluidR3_GM.sf2. This gave a longer sustained note. Encouraged, I tried some more fonts and found that the font, "acoustic_grand_piano_ydp_20080910.sf2" gave me a sustained note of nearly the full six beats.
So now, this is my default font!
My grateful thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion. You solved my problem!