I'm trying to use MuseScore to reproduce a chant found in one of the footnotes to Edward William Lane's early 19th century three volume translation of the Arabian Nights. The chant begins with a note that elides from a dotted quarter (eighth?) note to an undotted sixteenth, as shown in the attached screenshot; but with a shared notehead. It is very clearly NOT two separate notes individually articulated, but rather a case where the voice does a similar thing to bending a note on a guitar string, where one note blurs into the other. Is it at all possible to find a way to get MuseScore to do this?
I'm confused, your screen shot shows a perfectly normal dotted eighth - sixteenth pattern. Did you attach the wrong example? That's entered normally, just type "4 . G 3 A", and it plays exactly like it looks - those are two separate notes.
If you mean, a singer might subjectively speaking slide the pitch a little, that may or may not be - I don't see any reason to do so based on the notation, though. If you feel you'd like to hear MsueScore do that anyhow, adda glissando from the palette, and set the playback to "portamento" using the Inspector.
An afterthought... The original score does seem very cramped, and it is surely possible that the first syllable is not a diphthong "Lái" but articulated as "Lá - i"? If you are convinced that the first syllable is intended for both notes, then you could use a Wide elision symbol from the palette Special Characters (Symbols tab) accessed with the F2 shortcut?
Thank you all for your feedback, it;s been very helpful in understanding. I did miss the fact that it was in a pickup measure (still don't know how to add those), and didn't know about typing the notes in, nor did I understand the shared notehead help file. I thought I couldn't have a shared notehead between a dotted and an undotted note; because when I used the mouse click "add notes" method in a regular measure of four beats, it was giving me the two notes without the shared notehead, and I misunderstood the part of https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/noteheads#shared-noteheads where it says "MuseScore uses the following rules: / ... Dotted notes do not share noteheads with undotted notes."
On looking closer at the score in Lane's footnotes, I see that "'la" and "ilaha" are in fact two separate words; again, the confusion in my mind probably springs from limited understanding of what shared noteheads in fact are and what they do. I thought that they meant the notes flowed into each other instead of being articulated separately.
Also, in case it still isn't clear: "shared noteheads" refer to when there are multiple voices on a single staff, and for one note, the two voices have the same note and share the notehead. For example, the note on beat two here:
Comments
Doesn't https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/noteheads#shared-noteheads help here?
I'm confused, your screen shot shows a perfectly normal dotted eighth - sixteenth pattern. Did you attach the wrong example? That's entered normally, just type "4 . G 3 A", and it plays exactly like it looks - those are two separate notes.
If you mean, a singer might subjectively speaking slide the pitch a little, that may or may not be - I don't see any reason to do so based on the notation, though. If you feel you'd like to hear MsueScore do that anyhow, adda glissando from the palette, and set the playback to "portamento" using the Inspector.
As Marc said: " your screen shot shows a perfectly normal dotted eighth - sixteenth pattern"
Are you missing the fact that the two opening notes are in a pickup measure (anacrusis) which consists of just one beat?
![Arabian Nights fragment.png]( "Arabian Nights fragment.png")
In reply to As Marc said: " your screen… by DanielR
An afterthought... The original score does seem very cramped, and it is surely possible that the first syllable is not a diphthong "Lái" but articulated as "Lá - i"? If you are convinced that the first syllable is intended for both notes, then you could use a Wide elision symbol from the palette Special Characters (Symbols tab) accessed with the F2 shortcut?
![Alternative lyric handling.png]( "Alternative lyric handling.png")
In reply to An afterthought... The… by DanielR
Thank you all for your feedback, it;s been very helpful in understanding. I did miss the fact that it was in a pickup measure (still don't know how to add those), and didn't know about typing the notes in, nor did I understand the shared notehead help file. I thought I couldn't have a shared notehead between a dotted and an undotted note; because when I used the mouse click "add notes" method in a regular measure of four beats, it was giving me the two notes without the shared notehead, and I misunderstood the part of https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/noteheads#shared-noteheads where it says "MuseScore uses the following rules: / ... Dotted notes do not share noteheads with undotted notes."
On looking closer at the score in Lane's footnotes, I see that "'la" and "ilaha" are in fact two separate words; again, the confusion in my mind probably springs from limited understanding of what shared noteheads in fact are and what they do. I thought that they meant the notes flowed into each other instead of being articulated separately.
In reply to Thank you all for your… by danielhchadwi
" I did miss the fact that it was in a pickup measure (still don't know how to add those)"
The Handbook section Measure duration will be helpful to you:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/measure-operations#duration
In reply to Thank you all for your… by danielhchadwi
Also, in case it still isn't clear: "shared noteheads" refer to when there are multiple voices on a single staff, and for one note, the two voices have the same note and share the notehead. For example, the note on beat two here: