Guitar Bending needs love.

I found out about MuseScore quite recently via A YouTube video about version 4.

As a guitarist, my first thought was, "I wonder if it can do Tablature." I was happy to see that it does.

Overall it is brilliant I love the ability to link standard notation with tab.

But. As many bug reports suggest there is a problem with bends. The first time I used it was trying to transcribe something from video.

Sorry about the blurry picture, it's a photo of the TV. He is using standard guitar notation on both the tab and standard staves. I can't produce the equivalent in MuseScore.

It looks to me that MuseScore is trying to use the tab style on both staves. This causes problems because tab and standard have different focuses. Standard focuses on the music (melody and harmony) Tab focuses on what the fingers are doing to produce the music.

This a pretty good explanation of what guitarists expect to see Total Guitarist: How to Read Tab

Notice that for diatonic bends, the standard staff shows both the first and second notes with a straight line version oa a slur connecting them, while the tab only has the first note with the bend curved arrow indicating the interval.

I don't know if there's a well known name for the straight line version of the slur, for this feature request, I'll call then bend slurs or blurs for short. ;-)

A bend and release in the standard staff has the three notes with the blurs over each pair. The tab has the first note as a string/fret with a bend up and the interval of the bend up is connected to the same fret pair within parentheses. The middle note is only implied in tablature.

My expectations would be using linked standard and tab staves:

1. If I add a bend in tablature, the second note should be inserted after the first in the standard staff connected by a blur.

2. On the standard staff, I should be able to select two adjacent notes, and apply a bend. This would add the blur in the standard staff, and the tab should add a bend to the fingering of the first note and remove or suppress the fingering of the second note. The interval would come from the two notes. I the interval is descending a pre-bend and release would be notated appropriately in both, per the referenced web page

3. It should be possible to add bends with different intervals in tablature. This could be by any or all of:

   1. Having a full bend as the default, and then edit the interval afterwards.
   2. Allowing the interval to be changed in the Guitar palette.
   3. Select two consecutive fingerings and apply the bend.

   Note that 1 and two could allow the entry of microtonal intervals.

4. It would be possible to do a bend and release in a standard staff by selecting three consecutive notes and following the pattern in #2 above.

This would be a start. I won't try to cover everything in the referenced Total Guitar article. Some would be great icing, but the above should cover the most common use-cases.

There may be other considerations involving other instruments which are capable of continuous pitch changes, Slide Trombones, and members of the Violin family come to mind. I think these usually use glissando notation, I'd think that MuseScore would keep these separate.

I've looked at the code a bit and while I'd love to take a crack at a pull request I'd need lots of help.

The code has both a bend and a stretched bend concept which I don't yet Grok, and there is at least one TODO comment indicating the stretched bend is going away.