Hi all–
Does anyone know why there is a difference in how you enter breath marks? By that I mean to say: on everything else such as barlines, you have to select the appropriate note and it appears BEFORE that note, whereas with breath marks you click on a note and it appears AFTER. I hadn’t used a breath mark in a really long time and I immediately noticed the discrepancy in behavior when I did not get the expected result based on conditioning from the program. Is it just me or does anyone else find this odd?
(It makes sense to take a breath after a note… to be clear. But if that’s going to be the default behavior, shouldn’t barlines appear after notes rather than before them for consistency’s sake?)
How are you adding the breath marks?
Select a note, Ctrl-H, comma (I assume).
The before/after behavior of these different elements feels normal to me (perhaps just because I’m familiar with them now), and I’m sure it won’t be changing anytime soon.
Perhaps a barline is best thought of as a zero-time event, so it goes “at” the downbeat at the earliest possible spot. Whereas a breath mark clearly should go after a note, since it modifies its duration.
About two years ago Daniel Spreadbury said something along the lines of this: you select the note you want to be the start of the new section when creating the caesura [and I guess this applies to barlines too], and you select the note after which you want the singer to take a breath. Feels right to me.
This is one of those features that are technically inconsistencies, but which I never notice because they are so intuitive. Daniel’s explanation as recounted by Leo seems exactly right to me.
I remember someone once arguing that Sibelius was inconsistent because, during stepwise keyboard input, you only pressed the ‘tie’ key AFTER inputting the note, whereas you set every other property (accidental, duration, articulation) BEFORE input. But it just seems so intuitively obvious that a tie comes after a note, to link it to the next note, that it didn’t even cross my mind until it was pointed out to me.
Yes, pianoleo’s explanation seems to make sense. I had added the breath mark with the button in the right panel. It just surprised me because whenever I do that with barlines the opposite behavior occurs. I only noticed it because once you get into a groove, you expect to apply different objects the same way—hence the difference jumped out at me; that’s all. I’m not trying to raise a big stink or lobby to have them change the behavior. I was just wondering if there was a reasoning and if it had jumped out to anyone else.