musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Needs more sensible defaults for guitar legato with tapping sections

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engraving guitar
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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.

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However, the same is not true of tab, neither in its simple, common, nor full form.

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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.

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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:

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However I didn't find a setting to make this the default, nor manually moving each symbol to the bottom results in proper alignment

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. 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

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