Hi,
Great tip in forum on clear harp glissando notation. Write two notes in one voice connect by gliss line, then use another voice for stemless, non-playing reference notes.
Tried Note Spacing in Engrave Mode. The spacing gets messed up because Dorico tries to align the two voices. Would like to change the spacing of the stemless notes ONLY so they are all equidistant from each other.
Any advice most welcome!
Thanks,
John
P.S. And if a secret for putting parentheses around all the reference notes, that would be a super bonus! Makes even clearer they are only reference notes.
You could put the reference notes later in the bar, so they don’t share a rhythmic position and therefore square-handle-note-spacing-column with the starting note? You could use a hidden tuplet if needed to control the rhythmic space they take up.
Or, put the first reference note in a different voice column to the “real” starting not, and use the secondary, circular handle to move just that voice column?
For parenthesized notes, see below – if you want a single left bracket before the first note in the run, and another single right bracket after the last note in the run, you might need to add them manually, e.g. using text items with collision avoidance disabled and moved in Engrave mode.
I’m not a harpist (nor married to one), but I’m curious: harp pedal diagrams are by no means arcane or exotic, they’re absolutely commonplace in contemporary harp literature AFAIK. I can’t imagine any harpist unable to read those. Hey, even I can read them easily.
Personally, I would think a diagram is both more concise and better readable than a tiny scale with a lot of accidentals (requiring some awkward workarounds in my favourite notation app along the way). So here’s my question: why do (some? most?) harpists prefer the messy scale over a tidy diagram?
Good question. As I understand it, the reference notes are for the pedal settings for the gliss only. (dim scale, whole tone, a chord, etc.)
What the pro told me, and I’ve heard elsewhere, is NOT to put pedal instructions on their parts. Of course the composer/arranger should be aware of pedaling problems. But the player will figure out how to mark the pedaled notes, and where.
That’s what I know (and understand). But glisses seem to be an exception. In a way, the cue scale is a pedal diagram as well, except it’s less readable than the modern one with the notches. Why?
