choke cymbal notation

• May 14, 2016 - 10:18

This nice guide to drum notaion:
http://web.mit.edu/merolish/Public/drums.pdf

describes how to notate a "choked" cymbal, that is, when you grab the cymbal just after you hit it, by puting an apostrophe after it:

choked cymbal (MIT).png

I was not able to find support for this in MuseScore. So here is a proposal to add support for this.

There are several workarounds, though.

- Writing "ch" or "choked" over the note is another common way to notate this, I think.

- Using a note head right parentheses. I discovered an alternative way which is more similar to the apostrophe:
1. add parentheses around the note head (by clicking on the '()' button in the palette)
2. select the left parethesis and delete it
3. Move the right parentheses slightly up and to the right.

The result looks something like this.
choked cymbal right parenteses.png

Comments

• May 15, 2016 - 10:37

Right, I forgot to say that I had tried the breath mark from the palette. The problem with this is that it is "spaced" as as an individual thing in the measure, like a note. That is, the space between the note and the breath mark depends on the width of the measure, or the number of other notes in the measure. If measure is wider, and there are few other notes in the measure, there will be more space between the cymbal note and the breath mark, and if the measure is more narrow, and crowded with other notes, there will be less space.

But the apostrophe for choked cymbal should have constant space to the note head, like a accidental etc.

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