Two-note tremolo playback issue

Hi there,
I’m working on a score with lots of two-note tremolos. In one particular spot, in the violin, the tremolo plays at the written for the first half of the tremolo and then drops down to very quiet playback for the second half. This continues over the course of several bars, which diminuendo from mp to niente. It does follow the diminuendo, but the overall playback sounds like it accents the beginning of each bar because it jumps back up to the written dynamic after playing very softly for the second half of the tremolo. I deleted the notes and input the same thing and got the same results. I tried to find a similar issue in the forum but couldn’t turn up anything. I’m using just the included sound library with default playback options. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Here’s the clip that’s giving me trouble…

tremolo playback issue.dorico.zip (2.2 MB)

now there’s a co-incidence. I’ve also had lots of problems with two note tremolos – very often in the way you described with the second half of the tremolo behaving differently to the first–and was planning to do a bit more research on them. It seems to happen with all string libraries I use I’ll look at your clip tomorrow morning.

I think the problem here is that Dorico is processing the dynamics before it processes the tremolo, so it’s creating the dynamics as if there are only two notes, each half a bar in duration, and then it’s creating all of the notes for the tremolo at that point, so the dynamics are not properly taken care of. This is something that we can hopefully address in a future version.

That makes sense — I thought it might be something along those lines. Thanks Daniel!

Not what I’d expected! Using the Halion default, I can confirm with slowing things right down to be sure, that there are only half the number of notes I would expect in the tremolo passages. Using NotePerformer, the playback is correct. Secondly, in the last bar the violin has two lines drawn which contradict each other – one a dim. and the other maintaining the same dynamic. The cello is correctly drawn. Both behave as expected in this respect. NP appears in fact to be correct throughout (when the poor sampling quality of their tremolos is taken into account).

The general issues with unmeasured two note tremolo playback appear to be twofold 1. that of course there is nothing sampled in most libraries for this so the playback gets confused and 2. with the majority of libraries, the notated three stroke tremolo appears to be interpreted as covering only the first note after which it reverts to the default patch with also unpredictable consequences.

Two solutions: 1. write out the music in full on a hidden stave (using “add staff below” or “change divisi” depending on solo or divisi) and disable playback of the visible notated tremolo. This is probably the best, if tedious 2. add a new “tremolo” playback technique (and hide it). When this is done, the pseudo tremolo will now continue throughout the duration. If Dorico could be changed to ensure that the notated tremolo works the same way as the user-defined p.t, then that would be a step forward, I think, though libraries currently do vary in behaviour with NotePerformer for some reason getting things generally correct.

Could be related to this bug:

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yes, I think it’s pretty likely – in fact I was thinking of drawing the comparison myself. Thanks for drawing my attention to the other thread which I hadn’t seen.