Possible to add 1/2 or 1 to the trill symbol?

Rather than 1/2 and 1, isn’t it more conventional to write HT and WT for “half-tone” and “whole-tone”? We do intend to add support for this notation in future.

Personally, I have only seen the 1/2 (and the 1 only once), and have never seen HT or WT. But I don’t conduct the stuff nearly as often as others. Someone like Thiago Tiberio is immersed in the stuff and would be of better counsel in this matter.

Maybe there isn’t really an official way of notating this and would it be good to have the choice of 1, W, 1/2 and H just so users can decide what to do. In the VST libraries it is indeed normal to notate the trills as H and W, so it could be a good idea to keep this in notation software as well.

Never seen HT or WT either, but did see 1/2 and 1/1 emerge in certain contemporary scores about 15 years ago. It’s not ubiquitous, obviously :slight_smile:

In English, perhaps. Please try to make things language-neutral, unless (even if…) there is a very strongly imposed convention in place!

I agree with Luis! I certainly wouldn’t see anything like HT in a french score, and I’m quite sure nobody here would understand the meaning of it.

… Hors Taxe …
… Haute Tension …
… Homérique Ténor …

Film arranger, conductor, and composer Tim Davies has an article on trill notation (A Trilling Experience) at his http://www.debreved.com site which might be helpful.

Why not just specify the 2 intervals that are alternated? That’s what I did in a recent composition I finished that is in open key. I added prefatory information in the Conductor Score saying that all trills are whole step unless indicated otherwise, and in the parts (and score) I added text showing the 2 notes if they are 1/2 step trills or to a note that is sharp or flat as shown in the attachment. Until Dorico can easily show smaller notes on a staff of the trill above like an ossia, (as I am accustomed to sometimes seeing), or a flat, sharp, or natural near the tr indication, just typing the 2 notes as text is completely unambiguous.

Luis, I don’t set the conventions used in Hollywood. As far as I understand it, HT/WT is indeed the convention used most widely in Hollywood.

It wasn’t clear from the sequence that you were referring strictly to the Hollywood-style notation. Still, my actual point is that there is far, far more music out there than what’s being made in Hollywood. You know this, of course, and the team has received unreasonable amounts of flak for not supporting certain conventions (some dubious) that are in place only in scoring from the get-go, but still, I’d ask you not to go the other way to compensate. When you do implement auxiliaries for trills, it would be disappointing to see gains in flexibility that wind up only being possible in very specific scenarios. Besides, if by any chance Claude pulled those screenshots from actual, official materials for some version of Harry Potter, one can see that the orchestrators for that session did prefer numerals to abbreviations.

And while we’re here, if we could specify auxiliar notes on the staff with less faking, I’d be delighted.

For what it is worth, in my orchestration on scores I use 1/2 and w. There is no actual standard so a flexible option is the best way!