Option to by default shorten all notes so they are 2/3 original duration and all staccato notes are 1/3 duration

• Jul 25, 2021 - 17:45
Reported version
3.6
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

I already posted something like this before but not here. Could there be an option to make all inputted or imported notes be Marcato by default and all staccato notes to be 1/3 duration not 1/2? This is a very common sequencing standard for midi files and it also produces great audio results. It would save me a lot of time selecting all the notes, applying Marcato, then taking out marcato in places with slurs and then still having to shorten staccato notes.


Comments

Workaround No Yes

I would recommend use the of the articulation control plugin for doing things like this - much easier than what you propose as a workaround.

As for eventually adding it as a standard feature, can you explain more about your special use case? I can't think of any situation in which a human musician would assume they are supposed to play all notes short. Is it that you are using a sound with a long release phase of the ADSR envelope that makes you want this? If it truly is a common thing then making such a feature built in could certainly be considered.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Take a look at this website: http://ragtimemusic.com/frame.html
Every single midi file is played in the 2/3 format. As a human it is nearly impossible to play notes RIGHT UP AGAINST EACH OTHER but this makes it so that the notes aren't quite staccato which, yes, sounds terrible. The notes are more natural when they aren't legato the whole time, have you seen anyone play ragtime music with all the notes legato in the bass? No, they will always have a bit of a break because the human hand would have to phase out of existence and pop back up on the next key to make a truly legato jump.

Actually, on piano it's trivial to play "most" notes right up against each other, even to overlap them slightly - that's how most of us were taught to play by default. Only in the unusual special case of ragtime and similar music that involves large hand/arm motions is that not necessarily feasible.

MuseScore doesn't possess AI to decide which style is likely to sound more realistic for any given passage, so it needs to choose one default then allow you to override it. As a compromise, MuseScore sets the default duration to be 95%, so there is a slight gap you can eliminate with a slur if you like. This works well for most music. As I said, if you prefer given notes to be played shorter in the special case of ragtime LH, simply use the various controls provided. Future versions of MuseScore may provide even more such controls, as well as some AI technology to do some of this automatically.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

95%? So that would explain why when I quantize the midi file i find that all the notes are a bit short, honestly, this 95% method makes Slurs pretty much impossible to hear as true legato... this is why I like the 2/3 timebase, you can hear when legato is introduced but it still allows for staccato, and when pedal is used then you can't even hear the difference. It just makes the piece a bit more expressive.

I would just like something that would make all the notes sound as if they had the Lourę articulation on them and any notes within a slur were 100% duration and notes with staccato sounded like they had staccatissimo.

Indeed, while the vast majority of piano music is played legato, if you're dealing with a specialty substyle that uses staccato by default, this would make sense to be able to tweak. And it does seem likely MuseScore 4 will support something like this. But meanwhile, as mentioned elsewhere, it should be pretty trivial to achieve this result today using the articulation plugins.