musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Add a palette for handbell articulations
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Description
Your idea
Add a new palette for articulation symbols that are unique to handbells and handchimes. Most of them should attach to the selected notes or chords, and like existing articulations, pressing "x" should toggle between above/below positioning. Some, like echo, do not attach to specific notes/chords but should anchor to a particular beat, even if no note plays on that beat.
The symbols I think would be most useful:
- Martellato (filled triangle pointing down, informally just called "mart")
- Martellato Lift (mart symbol followed by an arrow pointing up)
- Hand Martellato (mart symbol with a curved line over it)
- Muted Martellato (mart symbol enclosed in a circle)
- Suspended Mallet (+)
- Mallet on Table (+ with a staccato dot under it)
- Mallet Lift (+ with a staccato dot under it, followed by an arrow pointing up)
- Pluck Lift (staccato dot followed by an arrow pointing up)
- Echo (U-shaped arrow, often written with a beat number underneath the symbol)
- Gyro (circle-shaped arrow)
- Shake (almost exactly like "Trill line" from the Ornaments and Lines palettes, but with optional "Sk." instead of "tr" and does not use a neighboring pitch)
- Damp (bullseye sort of shape, positioned arbitrarily or on a barline)
- Selective Damp (looks like the Damp symbol, maybe a little smaller, but attaches to the stem of a chord)
- Table (arrow pointing down and slightly to the right, not really an articulation but behaves similarly)
- Double Table (two parallel arrows pointing down and slightly to the right, indicating that it applies to two bells)
There should also be a symbol for Roll. Rather than a specific articulation for handbells, we should use the same symbol used for drums. However, there isn't currently a Roll symbol for drums - visually it should look identical to the "32nd through stem" on the Tremolos palette (and yes, it's confusing for drummers that these two different things look exactly the same). There's room for improvement here.
There should also be some common text elements, such as:
- LV (let vibrate, or laissez vibrer if you're fancy)
- R (ring)
- TD (thumb damp)
- BD (brush damp)
- RT (ring touch)
- Pl (pluck)
- SB (singing bell)
- vib. (vibrate)
Ideally in some future version, all of these (except Table and Double Table) should affect playback.
Problem to be solved
The Symbols section of the Master Palette contains several symbols used for handbell notation, but they basically work as text characters; there's no way to intelligently attach them to notes the way common articulation symbols do, with appropriate positioning and scaling. Additionally, some of the existing symbols are poorly designed and hard to read (for example, the arrowheads on the "Swing down" and "Swing up" arrows are skinny and indistinct). And of course there's no playback support for any of this.
Prior art
No response
Additional context
Here's the Symbols/Handbells section of the Master Palette:
Here's a list of common notation symbols from Handbell Musicians of America, a.k.a the American Guild of English Handbell Ringers (AGEHR):
(This can be found at https://handbellmusicians.org/education/getting-started/ under Basic Ringing Techniques, Handbell and Handchime Notation Symbol Chart.)
Here's their full notation guide with lots of examples and explanations:
https://handbellmusicians.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/NotationGuide.pdf
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