Tremolo's can look ugly in cross-staff notation

• Jan 4, 2018 - 13:31

Solution: lengthen the stems test.pdf


Comments

In reply to by mike320

Mike,
Here is the original. Gaspard2.png
(Measure 24 of Scarbo (Gaspard de la nuit - Ravel)
Is that beautiful?
I also noticed that double clicking on tremolo"s I don't get handles & anchor points. Since you already have the technology (I'm old enough to remember 6 million dollar man), maybe it would not be too hard to implement this for tremolo's as well. For the esthetes among us.

In reply to by elsewhere

It's not ugly as MuseScore's versions. Cross staff tremolos aren't the prettiest music notations there are.

I remember first run 6 Million Dollar Man also. I don't have the technology or several things, including this, would be better...stronger...faster...

It looks like there is on ottava for the bottom staff. I'm guessing it's written in the bass clef while the top clef is in treble clef. If this is the case, have you listened to it play? I don't see how MuseScore could play this back properly.

In reply to by mike320

Hi Mike,

The plot thickens. There is a MuseScore transcription of Scarbo:

https://musescore.com/user/1233886/scores/4818724

The tremolo’s are near the bottom of page 1 and they ‘seem’ to play allright. But if you set Show invisible to true you see the truth…

Now strictly speaking, the tremolo as written there is wrong: with time signature 3/8 the tremolo should be between 2 quarter dotted notes and not between 2 8th dotted notes.
The transcriber picked up this error from the published version (Durand & Fils, 1909), imslp scores #246875 & following. Only the Kiev edition imslp #77915 has it correct. And there is also a difference in the ottavos’s between the scores. I left a note about this at the imslp scores.

The tremolo as I wrote it does not give any sound at all(?!) (and neither do the ones in Scarbo: if I copy the tremolo to a test file there is no sound.). Is this a known problem? See attached tremolo.mscz

Attachment Size
tremolo.mscz 6.86 KB

In reply to by elsewhere

I now have more time than I did earlier so I'll answer more of what I know.

Tremolos are not lines, they are ornaments so the only editing you can do is to move them up or down. Either double click one or select it and press ctrl+e, you then can move them with the arrows or ctrl+arrows.

I examined your tremolo.mscz file. I don't understand why the notes do not play. When I created the measures from scratch it played properly.

tremolo 2.mscz

You are correct that the tremolo should be between dotted 1/4 notes as you indicated. Tremolo between dotted 1/8th notes does not put enough beats in the measures. You are also correct that the notes at the top should be C## & E (you mentioned this on the score page).

In the score you found on MuseScore.com, the user did not use tremolos because he either didn't know how to annotate them or was propagating the incorrect notation from the version he used. He used lines that he worked very hard to thicken and make at the perfect angle for a tremolo. Had he made the beams invisible it would have looked correct. He also did some other workarounds that made the transcription job more difficult (such as the visible ottava). I see on score #77915, the ottava is written on both staves, which makes more sense because both staves have treble clefs.

In reply to by mike320

Many thanks for your comments.
One difference between tremolo & tremolo2 is that if you select a note & click the inspector in tremolo the velocity type is set to user, in tremolo2 to offset. I'm not sure what the difference is, but the author probably did this so that the visible notes would not play, only the hidden ones. And since I 'borrowed' his notes to create tremolo.mscz I inherited that property as well!

In reply to by elsewhere

I didn't notice that. I looked for the Play option to be checked and it was. I didn't look at Velocity type. So you know the difference, user velocity of zero is no sound. Offset velocity of 0 means that the last dynamic tells the velocity (otherwise known as volume to humans) of the note.

So to answer your question about if this is a know bug, the answer is that it is a known feature.

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