musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Needs more sensible defaults for guitar legato with tapping sections
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Description
Your idea
Legato sections with right or left hand tapping notate well on standard notation to my eyes, here I've just changed the symbol for tapping from a T to a +, and everything else is at their default.
However, the same is not true of tab, neither in its simple, common, nor full form.
Notice the misalignment of nearly every symbol in all 3 staves. There is a setting for aligning H, P and T symbols on the same slur, however, it is not always idiomatic of guitar to slur the entirety of these admittedly legato sections, nor does it help much making it look aligned.
The way published notation seems to handle this is by putting these markings on the bottom of the staff by default, as part of what seems to be throwing this out of alignment is the fact the slurs are usually presented above the numbers in tab:
However I didn't find a setting to make this the default, nor manually moving each symbol to the bottom results in proper alignment
My suggestion is that, at least in the simple tab, hammer on, pull off, and tapping notation should default to the bottom, and be aligned when such either by measure or system. For the other forms of tabs, an "align per system" option is the only solution I can personally come up with, as the bottom of the tab is occupied by rhythmic notation.
Problem to be solved
Ugly default behavior for legato sections with tapping on guitar.
Prior art
I haven't run this with other apps, but cursory search on google seems to show guitar pro does NOT align this by default
Published tab seems to either show the aforementioned legato notation on the bottom, or omit H and P symbols, slurring everything in-between string changes
Which is a fine and applicable solution for engravers. A third solution I see is slurring individual strings, but keeping the H and P symbols
Which I'm not sure how to do using the built in hammer-on/pull off feature, as that adds a second slur that makes it even more cluttered
Additional context
No response
Checklist
- This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
- I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reproducing the reported legato and tapping examples in MuseScore's simple, common, and full tab views, including the existing H/P/T alignment setting. Compare the resulting placement with the published-notation examples; done means the intended defaults or alignment behavior are agreed for each tab form and the affected cases no longer produce the reported misalignment.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- design, desktop
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100