Inconsistent "Swing" designation. Plays sometimes as straight.

• Dec 7, 2020 - 18:02

I'm using the "Swing" text command, which works 98% of the time to make the song swing, but I can't understand why it's not working the other 2% of the time. In that 2% that's not working, it's playing some notes as swing and others as straight.

As a related aside: I remember the olden days of WordPerfect for DOS word processor. You could turn on "Reveal Codes" which was like lifting the curtain to see how the codes were being used underneath the presentaion. This let you fix underlying problems. Would something like this be helpful to MS? I imagine being able to turn on Reveal Codes and seeing some extraneous code in these sections that is causing the "Swing" command to be ignored. One could edit in that mode and fix problems. In other MS threads where people had problems they solved it by looking inside the musicxml file itself. This is sort of reveal codes functionality, without it being built in. I'll leave it to others to determine if this is a good idea to make it part of the program. But as MS gets more complex to handle the true complexity of music, it might be good to be able to dip into the underlying XML to sort out problems. Maybe not.

Anyway... Excerpt attached. Notice everything is fine until measure 4, and the three eighth notes revert to Straight. I thought maybe the marcatos where the problem, but after removing them the problem remains.

In another section of this song, some instruments play Swing and others play Straight at the same time. Sounds pretty rough.

Thanks.


Comments

Actually, the notes are played swing - ti's the chord symbols that are not. Known bug/limitation, see #306506: Chord symbol playback doesn't follow swinged eights.

Regarding the codes, there wouldn't be anything to display, this is just a limitation in how chord symbol playback currently works. but if you were looking for any hidden codes, they aren't things you'd display on the score - they are things shown in dialogs boxes. Eg, right click the swing text, System Text Properties, Swing Setting. Or for individual notes, right-click then Piano Roll Editor.

3 8th note - The triplets in the Tuba and Trumpet? This is expected. I would suggest that you write it as 8th followed by 16ths (no triplet) since this is closer to the rhythm you want.

In reply to by mike320

I tried it with the 8th followed by 16 for the first two notes, and that sort of works, but the third 8th note still has wrong timing. I'm going to try triplets, even though I hate taking it out of the consistent previous 8th notes, going to triplets and then back to 8ths....

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