Ties among voices and staves
When dealing with complicated piano scores, there may be lots of cases where a tie goes from a voice to another, or a staff to another. Now we have to use fake ties or connect the ties to invisible notes to achieve this, and this will confuse braille transcription a lot. What's more, this increases the engraver's work on inputting lots of hidden notes, even creating unwanted new voices. Since tie is a spanner, and Musicxml also has start/stop points for it, it's ok to implement a tie through voices or staves. E.g., a C on voice 2 beat 2 ties to C on voice 1 beat 3, or left hand voice 1 beat 3. This is also useful when a inner voice from right hand crosses to left hand, tied to the next chord where left hand combines the two voices into one.
Comments
For a real tie between notes that are on different staves, invisible notes are almost never needed. I can't think of a situation in the last 3 scores I did for you that this is necessary. The invisible notes I've used in association with ties have been for Laissez Vibrer where I see a tie going from a whole note on beat 1 to the end of a measure full of notes shorter than a 16th note. One of the last measures I sent you is a measure where notes on staff 2 are tied to staff 3 on the next system and notes from staff 3 are slurred to notes on staff 2.
The relevant measures are in the score. I've added tb and te to show where the tie goes since they are cross-staff. cross staff tie.mscz
In reply to For a real tie between notes… by mike320
So this maybe my misunderstanding of ties between voices. Then how about ties between staves? E.g., Berg's piano sonata, bar 25, the last chord C#-F# of the inner voice is tied to bar 26, left hand's 3-note chord. I found this score uses lots of slurs instead of ties. Is there a way to use non-hidden notes to connect these two notes? If this can be done, then this can be closed.
https://musescore.com/antoineportes/alban-berg-opus-1
In reply to So this maybe my… by hhpmusic
The invisible notes are totally unnecessary though there is a small trick to making this work.
In MuseScore any real note (not a grace note) will tie to any real note that is displayed in the same staff with the same pitch, even if they are spelled different like F# & Gb or moved from a different staff or in a different voice. The trick to making this tie is to move the C#-F# chord to the bottom staff using cross staff notation (ctrl+shift+down arrow) apply the tie, then move the chord back to the top staff (ctrl+shift+up arrow). I have done this several time in the Schmitt scores I've been working on especially the one you haven't seen yet.
Here is the score where it did this. It's the complete score so I put a text note that says "tie to staff 2" so you can find it easier in my score. Berg_Alban_-_Piano_Sonata_Opus_1.mscz
Looking at the first 30 or so measures of the score, I think he did mostly a good job. There are a couple of things I would change such as the tie we are discussing and using note anchored lines to connect notes rather than lines from the palette. I might have chosen a different voice here and there but I don't see anything else that catches my eye as being really bad.
In reply to The invisible notes are… by mike320
Thank you very much for telling me how to do this. Since the Schmitt work is very complicated and sometimes confused the not-so-smart braille translation software, I might not realized the ties can cross voices and staves this way. Ok, this can just be a discussion, not going to be an issue. I can also include this into our engraving guide so that other people can do the same way when producing scores for braille transcription.
In reply to Thank you very much for… by hhpmusic
That's probably a good idea. If you haven't updated it already I'll do it in a few minutes.