Automatic Articulation Combination
Automatic articulation combination might help to streamline the use of commands/shortcuts to add or remove articulations & ornaments. At the moment, to add a tenuto-staccato to a note, one must open the palette and select a tenuto-staccato. However, it might make sense to automatically consolidate two individual articulations into one element. For example: currently, selecting a note and inputting shift+N will add a tenuto, and shift+S will add a staccato - two separate elements. Instead, I think it'd be logical for the system to automatically combine them into one tenuto-staccato marking. Although the single combined mark looks fairly similar to the pair, the playback varies for each. Similarly, just as shift-N on a note with a tenuto will currently remove it, in this proposed feature, shift+N on a tenuto-staccato will as well, leaving a staccato behind.
Comments
I know this was at least looked into during one of the development rounds and I get where the request is coming from.
I was one of the voices against that initial change for the simple reason that there (at least back then) was no way provisioned for breaking that combined articulation back into its components. And the reason for it was that I have a piece where I want the tenuto to be positioned above the note, and the staccato below it.
So I do support your request, but only if there is also a way to split those markings into their components when desired.
In reply to I know this was at least… by jeetee
I recall having an idea for how that might work, but I don't remember what it was :-(
I know it wasn't this, but what if "undo" right afterwards did the job? This is essentially how things like autocorrect work in a lot of programs, and would be trivial to implement. If you wait to long for undo to work, you could always delete it and re-add.
I think my actual idea was to connect it to automatic placement somehow. Like maybe, uncheck automatic placement for a combined articulation converts it into two separate articulations (each with autoplace on, but you could then also turn it off for them individually. This doesn't provide an obvious path to recombine them except to delete one then add it back.
Or there could be a new command to combine/split articulations. We could still combine them automatically, but this would allow you to easily split them up and recombine them.