I would like some help, advice or ideas on how I might notate the second half of the following bar for Solo violin:
As I understand it (I’m not a string player), this means that the rising notes from the G are to be played on the A string and the 3 Es are natural harmonics on the E string. Ideally I would like correct playback but I would settle for just correct notation that would be understood by a violinist.
thanks
If that is a normal G-clef, the circle in this case indicates just open E-string.
I guess you could use independent voice playback and put a hidden senza vib. for the open E string to more accurately play it back
As the cirle is actually a fingering marking, you could use the fingering markings of dorico to notate it
Hope I got it right.
Jesper
Edit: see now that it should have been a dotted line, not dashed.
vln.dorico (527.4 KB)
I always love these “replicate the snippet” threads … you beat me to it.
That is spot on! Thank you. But how do you get separate the up stem and down stem voices on the same stave? This is a technique I need to learn!
I’d also recommend using the contemporary “0” indication for the open string, rather than the “o” used in your example.
and this, for the exact reason pointed out here: those Es are not harmonics, they are open strings (zeros indicate “no finger”.)
So use Dorico’s fingering feature to notate them as such, rather than the harmonic circles.
as far as I’m concerned, even the “sul la” is redundant, since it’s obvious what needs to be played here.
to get the separate up/down stem notes, just write them in two voices: the Es in voice 1, the G - Bb in voice 2.
Using two voices, 2:nd created with shift-V for the downstem voice. Here with voice-colors turned on.
Jesper
Thank you all, especially Jesper for winning the race to the solution! I clearly couldn’t see the wood for the trees!
One reason I thought they may be natural harmonics is that this bar appears in the Double Bass part (F-clef):
As I said I’m not a string player so it’s largely guess work on my part!
yes, that’s a two-octave harmonic on the A string for the contrabass (touch 4th.)
this is one of the main reasons for NOT using the small circle to indicate an open string. there’s simply too much confusion between a harmonic and an open string fingering.
this is a particular problem when examining hand-written scores.
here’s an example from my violin concerto. notice that I don’t bother with the “0” fingering the 2nd time the figure repeats. It’s self-evident.
bar 73 is simply a double stop,
bar 74 is a single harmonic,
bar 75 is the double stop with crossed voices, as in your example,
bar 76 is back to a single harmonic,
bar 77 repeats the crossed voices, but no fingering, since it’s self-evident due to the previous instance of the motif,
and bar 78 is a slightly mean chromatic shift into an artificial harmonic.
Very clear explanation. Thank you.
