Some ideas on the notation of symbol patterns

I would like to share the results of experimenting with the changing of the speed of the trill to obtain other symbol patterns like the following ones:
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animated GIF:
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I have changed the default symbol for “trill wiggle” (all speeds) to Bravura character: U+E210 (stem). Now I can get different stem patterns that increase or decrease the separation between the stems. The stem pattern is obtained creating a trill and hiding “tr” symbol. The fanned beams are created independently, hiding the notes and stems of all notes under the beam except the first and last one.
The advantage of doing this, is that the distance between stems is kept independently of the music spacing and it is also kept in parts (I tried to obtain similar results with bravura text, but then I had to adjust the end of the text in parts which is very time consuming if this notation is used a lot).
This can also be obtained with the wavy glissando line. In that case, you can also change the inclination of the pattern, but you can’t change its separation.
It would be nice that a future implementation of lines could include this kind of pattern repetition, allowing a change of speed, like in trills. Just a suggestion.


PD: Of course, doing this will not allow to use the usual wavy trill or glissando line…

While I have no use for this, it is certainly one of the most interesting hacks I’ve seen in a long time.

Thank you Romanos401! It would be really useful if it were possible to apply to individual glissandos or trills, instead of all of them at the same time… at the moment it is just an idea. I hope that a future line creation feature would include this kind of pattern control, with gradual spacing control. It would really make a big difference between the traditional “symbol pattern” line creation.

I forgot to specify that the symbol that has to be changed for the gliss. is “trill wiggle segment, fastest” (it changes also the lift, plop, fall smooth and doit smooth jazz ornamentations).

Although the distance between the stems will be independent of the spacing in your “work-around”, the number of drawn stems will depend on the spacing: wider spacing will result in more repeated stems, whereas tight spacing will result in less of them. That might/might not be what you want. Having said that, we do intend to handle repeated glyphs as a line style when we will implement generic lines in Dorico.

Thak you András, I agree, but this kind of notation usually is approximate and does not indicate the exact number of notes, but the inner rhythmic content of a specific effect (like scratch cracks for the strings, fast articulations in winds, etc.). So the number of stems is usually not very important.

These are very good news! I need them as the air I breath :wink:. I hope you are considering some type of variable control of the separation, size (or even rotation) of the repeated glyphs. To indicate examples like these:
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That would be amazing!!