Notating melody to be played and held down on piano?

• Jan 20, 2019 - 11:01

Apologies if this has already been posted.
I'm transcribing a piece of music in MuseScore 3 and have a query about the format of piano chords when they are to be played one by one, and held down. I don't mean arpeggiated chords, where the notes are to be played in rapid succession, but rather where I have a passage of semiquavers (sixteenth notes) but I want each note held down while playing the next note, like a really slow arpeggiated chord. (Not sure if I explained it well, please see attached screenshot for reference.) I also don't want this effect done by a damper pedal.
I have managed to input it, but it looks rather messy with all the notes and ties. You can see in the second bar I tried to make it simpler, but when playing back with the keyboard on screen, I noticed the first two notes were released before the end of the bar, i.e. the first two notes are each only worth minim + semiquaver / half note + sixteenth note, as written.

My question is, is there a neater way of notating it, not for MuseScore playback but to make the sheet music look cleaner?

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Screenshot from 2019-01-20 18-52-05.png 8.21 KB

Comments

• Jan 20, 2019 - 15:53

Your way is the way I've seen it done in the past. If there are a bunch of them, you are better off using the arpeggio symbol you're avoiding an adjust the Stretch setting in the inspector for it, so it plays at a good speed. You can then put a performance note or even create an ossia showing how you expect the first one to be played. If there are several in a row, write sim. on the score over the next occurrence so the performer will understand what is expected.

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