Problem with a transposing expression map entry

[SampoKasurinen]

Hi!

I only so far used the script in a context that has lot of legato and not really many marcato passages. But it’s true that if you have in general fast moving music, the script does not do that much (since the delay for shorts and marcato is only 60 ms).

I heard a rumor that CSS might be developing their own script, which would of course be great! I’ve also suggested improvements to Dorico expression maps, that would remove the need for the external multiscript:

@SampoKasurinen

For proper control over legato, the note start offset would need to be set in milliseconds rather than ticks in the expression maps (since length of the ticks depends on the tempo of the project).

At least Cinematic Studio Strings (for which I’ve been making expression maps) has three different legato transitions: fast (100 ms), medium (250ms) and slow (333 ms). It would be great if Dorico could automatically pick the correct transition and offset based on how much time there is for the legato transition to happen. Therefore I have suggested that expression maps could have a condition for the length of the previous note as well as the length of the current note.

There would also need to be a condition that tells if the note is the first of a legato chain: in that case no offset is needed.

I have also a suggestion of how this could be achieved: the note length parameter could also have a value for “rest”, similar to the other values (“short”, “very short”…). “Previous note length” -condition would then look at the note length parameter few ticks before the note: if it would return a “rest”, that would mean the note is the first of a legato chain.

I would be very interested to hear what @PaulWalmsley would think about this kind of technical approach - would it make sense or are they going towards a different approach? I think there are also other libraries that would require different offset for first note of legato phrase, so this could be perhaps useful for a larger group of users (not just CSS users).