Ability to set articulated (e.g. staccato) playback without using the equivalent notation
Type
Functional
Frequency
Few
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
It is common in orchestral literature that, if articulations (e. g. staccato) are applied on notes in several following measures, only the first few measures are written with this articulation, followed by the term "sim." . This means that the musician should continue to play articulated notes. This method leads to increased readability.
For MuseScore, it would be nice to have a feature telling the synthesizer to play notes as staccato (or whatever) notes, even if they are not marked as such. This would allow to use the above notation method and still listen to the "true" (intended) sound.
Comments
Interesting suggestion! You get this effect currently by simply marking the articulations invisible, but more control over playback parameters is definitely a common enough request. Hopefully someday, the notation features that represent the primary purpose of MuseScore will be complete enough that diverting attention to these sort of playback subtleties will make sense.
You could already do it by changing the ontime and offtime offsets of the notes. But it's a lot more cumbersome than adding a stacatto to many notes (click first, shift click last, double click staccato).
I'm curious about the UI for such a feature. Any ideas?
Maybe you could drag a 'sim' onto the staccato. The sim would land in the next note by default. You then double-click the sim and adjust what note it stops on in the score (with the help of perforated lines). Something like the attached example.
It might go against the primary goal of MuseScore though, which is notation (not playback).
Pressing L already brings up dynamics. A dynamic called "sim" or "simile" could be created and you could right-click on it to set its properties, which could include staccato, legato, marcato etc., all of which affect playback. You could also have the text itself as a property so that you could change it to something like "sempre legatissimo" should you wish.
Wow, so many ideas :)
But, concerning the first workaround, I would suggest to add the ability to remove staccato from several notes with one click. Of course, adding them is easy (mark all notes, double-click staccato), but they can't be removed in a similar manner (as far as I know). This really IS a notation issue, so this might be one thing to be tackled in the near future ;) If this can't be done, marking the notes and checking/unchecking an option called "Playback: Staccato" or something in the note preferences seems much more convenient to me than removing staccato dots one by one if I realize I don't like them ;)
Workaround:
1] Add staccato to all - [Ctrl]-a followed by double-clicking on the staccato symbol in the Articulations and Ornaments palette.
2] Make all staccato invisible - ([Ctrl] and + to zoom in a bit helps here) right-click on a staccato mark, choose Select > All Similar elements then right-click again and choose Set Invisible.
3] Select the staccato elements that you wish to see (e.g. the first measure in a movement) and make them visible again.
If this is ever implemented as a feature I would suggest allowing it to be done as a dynamic rather than as a global change to the playback of the whole piece.
You already can remove staccatos from as many notes as you want in one click. Just select the markings themselves (using standard ctrl-click Windows shortcut for multiselect, or standard equivalent on whatever OS you use) and hit Delete. Lasso also works to select if they happen to be positioned conveniently enough that you can select the markings but not the notes.
I guess 4.0 will resolve this nicely.
Meanwhile, the various articulation & ornament playback plugins also provide good solutions for now.