Measured tremolo playback with Expression Maps

[dko22]

@juanar10

@dko22 if you use this:

It’s the same as:

However on playback you can see the difference between those two bars:

You can also see that Dorico assigned a “Natural” sound to the tremolo note, and “Natural, note lenght <= medium” to the short notes, event though they should be the same.

I think I’ve worked out how all of this behaves and it’s not exactly as expected! Take a look at this example

which corresponds to this

in playback.

Bars 1-3 play as expected - in other words bar 2 has two semis and two quavers and bar 3 uses the tremolo patch with three or four slashes – anything above two automatically invokes the sampled tremolo if available from the EM. However as soon as you put a 1-2 stroke tremolo on a note longer than a crochet, the playback interprets both minims and semibreves (or whole notes) as crotchets from the point of view of playback. In other words this is sounding similar to @patrom 's bug earlier and your own point. I had not expected one and two stroke minims and semibreves to play back with the same lengths.

One important point is the following – the NoteLength automation is irrelevant. I tested this with the default EM and the behaviour with respect to tremolos is the same. The other thing related to this is that the choice of patch when using the appropriate EM relates to the primary note and ignores any tremolo marking.

I tried this little passage at tempo 120. The actual patches, as expected, change as note lengths are shorter but the tremolo behaviour is unchanged.

My conclusion is that simply cannot use one or two stroke tremolos with a note longer than a crochet and expect correct playback. The only reason I never noticed this before is that I wouldn’t normally notate a measured tremolo over such notes though clearly some others do.

When it comes to multi-note tremolos, things get even more complicated but I don’t want to do there just now.

[juanar10]

Looks like we are all in the same page! And it looks like there is no workaround so far
We’ll get there!

[dko22]

does indeed look like we are coming to similar conclusions!

As for a workaround, well there is one for solo players. If you right-click on the staff, you have the option under “staff” of “add staff below”. You can then notate in full on this staff but hide it (using “staff visibility” on the same context menu) and disable playback on the original with the dodgy tremolos. In other words you have a hidden staff for the correct playback and a visible one for the correct notation. After the tremolo section, just “remove staff”. This puts things back to normal but the magic is that your playback is still retained. In the score there should be signposts as below when done correctly

Unfortunately it doesn’t work for section players, though.

[Panos_Mertis]

Hi! Did you manage to find any workaround for this?

[dko22]

if you mean the equivalent for a section, then you should choose “change divisi” from the same menu and then click on 2 and confirm with OK. After adding the notes for playback, you can then actually delete the “divisi” flag but the contents will be retained just as for a solo instrument.