"Dynamic" controls in Inspector
I'm using 2.0.2 under 32-bit Linux Mint 17.1. When I enter a dynamic marking or a crescendo/decrescendo hairpin and then select it, the Inspector shows a field with choices "Part|Staff|System", and also "Velocity Change" for a hairpin. The values coming up appear to be defaults, always "Part" and 0 respectively, the latter irrespective of the starting and ending dynamic markings. Yet changing these settings seems to have no effect on playback - are the fields active for the software synthesizer? Should I even be conceerned with these fields?
Comments
"Velocity Change" controls the how big of a volume change the hairpin has. 0 means "auto" - it uses whatever the previous and following dynamic marking are and makes the notes under the hairpin go gradually from the forer to the latter. Note that hairpins do not work over the course of a single note - they only change the volume from note to note.
The Part / Staff / System controls whether the hairpin applies to just the staff it is on, or to the whole part containing that staff 9eg, a piano part has two staves, an organ may have three), or to the whole system (all staves).
So if I have e.g. 2 voices on a single staff, and I want the (de)crescendo to apply to both voices, the default "Part" setting is what I want? That makes everything simpler - so I don't need to be concerned about any of these parameters, unless I have something like a decrescendo that just trails off without a following dynamic, in which case I would specify a nonzero velocity change to give the right effect.
In reply to So if I have e.g. 2 voices on by dhfx
Yes, the default setting is what you want in the majority of cases - that's why it is the default :-). The only time you would normally need to mess with things is if you choose not to include an ending dynamic for whatever reason, or if you need separate dynamics for the two staves of a piano. Or if you want to place one dynamic on one staff and have it apply to all staves - but this is very non-standard, and won't help the human players trying to play the music as they won't understand the hairpin is meant to apply to them.