Here's an idea for the next update
I was wondering why the Falls, Doits, Scoops, Plops,and Slides don't work, and those would make songs sound better, like if i was using trumpet to make a trumpet part of Sir Duke and it involves falls to make it sound like the song and it doesn't work, i'd stop making it, even a trumpet quartet of Havana, please make it happen, I'd predicate it and i think everyone else would too, thanks.
Comments
There is actually quite a lot of work, in several different areas, to get these types of articulations and inflections to playback properly.
The first step for this is to record (or source) quality samples for each articulation or inflection. The next step would be to create a soundfont that supports these.
A number of improvements to the built-in synthesizer will need to be made to support these.
Once this is done, MuseScore variant capabilities need to be expanded to support calling a distinct MIDI pitch for each unique symbol used for the desired articulations and inflections.
This is all very possible, and I do agree it will create a much more realistic playback experience. The only issue is time and how this fits in with other initiatives.
Personally, a dream extension of mine would be a MuseScore Jazz extension (ideally sampling the UNT One O'Clock Lab Band :-) ).
In reply to There is actually quite a… by Daniel
It would not have to be as hard as recording a sample and assigning a patch for each individual articulation or inflection. Simply take what MuseScore already does with "Bend" under "Articulations and Ornaments" on the Palette and write a similar plugin for the falls, slides, doits, and pops under "Arpeggios an Glissandos." "Bend" seems to be applying a pitch envelope to the instrument sample already in use, because in the dialog box for "Bend," the user can control the entire contour of the bend, including how much pitch change, direction of pitch change, and rate of pitch change. If you go the "new sample for each inflection" route, you have to include not just samples for each of the inflection types, but an infinite number of samples for the infinite variations on these samples that are very easily created with the "Bend" dialog box.
The only thing keeping the "Bend" feature from behaving like a fall is that the pitch contour can only be adjusted higher than the reference note. This is appopriate for bends since "bend" is a guitar technique that can ONLY raise a pitch - stretching a guitar string to a lower pitch is a physical impossibility. But it seems to me that the only thing that would be needed to make the falls, etc., playback would be a simple adjustment to the "bend" dialog box that would allow adjusting the pitch contour to pitches lower than the reference note as well as higher. Then, all of these effects - slides, falls, doits, etc., could be creating with a single dialog box using the plugin that MuseScore already has.
In reply to It would not have to be as… by Glenn Blank
You wrote:
The only thing keeping the "Bend" feature from behaving like a fall is that the pitch contour can only be adjusted higher than the reference note. This is appopriate for bends since "bend" is a guitar technique that can ONLY raise a pitch - stretching a guitar string to a lower pitch is a physical impossibility.
True, but pre-bend (bending to a lower pitch - i.e. releasing a stretched string) is possible.
See:
https://musescore.org/en/node/116731
Regards.
In reply to You wrote:… by Jm6stringer
"Pre-bend . . . IS possible." Yes, but that is still bending from a HIGHER pitch down to the nominal pitch rather than bending from the nominal pitch to a LOWER pitch. The difference may sound like mere semantics; but creating a downward pitch bend by releasing a stretched string is totally different from what a wind instrument does, and the difference in mechanism is reflected in the differences between how guitar music and trumpet music, for example, are notated. So for example, if a C is written on the staff and a full step bend is applied to it using "Bend" as per the node you referenced above, the playback starts on a D and falls backs to the C; this is appropriate for guitar. But when a trumpet player sees a C on the staff with a fall applied to it, he starts on the C and bends the pitch downward from there. MuseScore cannot accommodate this convention since there is no way to bend the pitch downward from the note in the score (i.e., the nominal pitch); you can only bend the pitch above the nominal pitch - whether you are bending FROM the higher pitch as in pre-bend or TO the higher pitch, the pitch is still higher, not lower than the nominal pitch.
There are of course, as you say, ways to create the correct playback; but they involve either having the score notated incorrectly for the wind instruments or else an unwieldy, clunky workaround to get both a correct playback AND correct score. You were kind enough to reply to me both here and on the thread I created on this same topic, and I gave examples of what I mean there, which can be seen at
The bottom line is that I am proposing a very simple solution to the quandary. Daniel's scenario above is, as he points out, unfeasibly cumbersome in the amount of coding, sampling, and computer memory required. My approach is a minor adjustment to a component and interface that MuseScore already has. That is, on the grid in the Bend dialog box, the bottom line currently represents the nominal pitch, which of course limits pitch bends to pitches above the nominal pitch. Simply reconfigure this dialog box so that the line representing the nominal pitch is in the midde of the grid, allowing pitch bends below as well as above the nominal pitch. I have described in the thread above how this one component could then be integrated with doit, plop, scoop, fall, and slides as well as with "Bend." In fact, all of these menu items could themselves be reduced to a single menu item, the individual element being specified via the Inspector with four toggles to determine which symbol appears on the score: a curve/straight toggle for differentiating slides from scoops, plops, doits, and falls; a toggle for pre-notehead (scoops and plops) vs. post-notehead (doits and falls) placement; a toggle for above-notehead (plops and doits) vs. below-notehead (scoops and falls) placement; and finally, a check box for specifying the guitar bend symbol instead. And with the nominal pitch being the middle line rather than the bottom line of the dialog box grid, playback can be custom set equally well for all of these pitch bend types.