Crescendo Playback Problem

• May 19, 2018 - 16:00

Attached is my work-in-progress transcription of a cover I found on YouTube. I returned today for the first time since the recent update to find some crescendos not working properly - namely those starting in bars 42 and 49. Instead of starting at the preceding dynamic and slowly rising, they drop down to pp, stay there, and then jump back up to the new velocity.
The crescendos on all my other files (and elsewhere in the same file) work correctly and if I copy-paste each section to a new file, the dynamics work fine. Yet when in context, these two particular phrases don't work. I've tried replacing the current lines both with new lines and with the written notation. The written form worked briefly, but then started doing the same thing.
Am I missing something? I can't see why they don't work in those specific cases in their locations in the piece, yet all other crescendos work normally.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Attachment	Size
Uchiage_Hanabi.mscz	45.89 KB

Comments

Marc Sabatella

• May 19, 2018 - 16:29

A couple of things:

MuseScore does not support change of volume on a single note, only from note to note
By default, MuseScore uses the dynamic marking before and after the crescendo on the same staff to determine how to play the play the crescendo. If you don't explicitly put dynamics right there, MuseScore looks as far forward or backwards as it needs to to find something, which may produce surprising results
You can override the default behavior for a crescendo using the Inspector (View / Inspector)

Your crescendo in measure 42 does not have a dynamic marking before it, so it looks backwards for the first one it can find on the same staff, which is the "f" in measure 24 (the "mp" in 34 is on the other staff). Similarly, the "mf" after the crescendo is also on the wrong staff, so it is ignored in favor of the "p" in measure 72 (at least, that's the next one I saw).

Best to be consistent and always attach dynamics to the top staff in piano music. If you need to do a manual adjustment to its position, best to use the arrow keys or Inspector rather than the mouse to avoid accidentally reattaching the dynamic to a different note/staff than where it originally was.

Chiggleyd

• May 19, 2018 - 16:45

Thank you for the quick reply - this did indeed fix the issue. I have been assuming that both staffs that make up the piano part counted as one (since a dynamic on one staff transfers over to the other). I'm glad to find out exactly how this works however, and I'll definitely take that last advice to heart in the future.
Thanks again.