NOTION Music Forum

Is there any way to get dotted slurs in Notion? Sibelius has got several possible slurs.

I need this between notes that is supposed to be sung on the same vocal and on the same note two times, but to let it sound like a new note. Example:
"Al - le - lu - u - ia"

the "u" is on the same note as "lu" and to avoid this to sound like one note the choir should kind of accentuate the "u". This would normally be written with a dotted slur between "lu and u".

My dash problem worked out btw.

Using a regular slur is perfectly acceptable notation; in fact, preferable. Dotted slurs are not available in Notion.

I attached just one example from a Google search on "alleluia sheet music." I found no examples with dotted slurs.

Best wishes,
Thorrild

Thanks but this is different from my case.

I've uploaded an image from the score on this link: http://postimage.org/image/fh0rmx89f/

With normal slur the a flat notes would look like a tie, but it should be sung lu - u - ia, not luuuuu - ia.

mrarnesen wrote:With normal slur the a flat notes would look like a tie, but it should be sung lu - u - ia, not luuuuu - ia.

You can do it like this, although I changed the pitch of the notes and used a modified type of phonetic spelling for the lyrics, which is fabulous . . .





Fabulous!

P. S. I sang in a liturgical boys choir as a child, which was one of the smarter things I did in those days, and the cathedral had massive reverberation, so we had to enunciate everything in the extreme, which for example required singing "egg-shell-sea-us" when the actual lyric was "eccelsias", but the sheet music had the actual lyrics, so we had to remember the phonetic version, which was a bit surreal, since all the Classical pieces had Latin lyrics, but the best thing was that I learned how to sight-sing Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart treble clef stuff, which is the reason I do everything in treble clef, since for me (a) treble clef is vastly intuitive and (b) with the NOTION 3 transposition feature I can cause the notes to be played in the correct registers or ranges, hence here in the sound isolation studio there are 12 notes and 8 or so octaves, which makes everything mathematically elegant, really . . .

Really!

Thanks for your advices. I like both of them but think I'm gonna use your first example.

I still hope Notion4 will have dotted slurs

As my language is closer to Latin than to English I don't have the same problem, although I've experienced the same as you did, though in Russian Tchaikovsky etc.

Fancy/Graphic notation is lovely and a great tool for music composition. But for performance; not so much. Everything you notate differently from what they are expecting will eat into your rehearsal time. The fancier the notation, the more questions, the less time for actual singing/playing/rehearsing. If it is truly necessary to the figure being performed correctly (for instance; if the dotted slur was to actually be performed differently than a standard one) then of course, you do what is most clear. But if it's just an aesthetic choice, It's been my experience that it doesn't end well.

just my two cents
tim

tubatimberinger wrote:just my two cents
tim

...And money well spent, too.

I can't really speak to the notational needs of others, but personally I don't need Notion to do every graphic trick in the book. There is so much basic, standard notation that Notion can't do; the dotted slur is merely one item on a very long list, and on my personal list it is not in the top one hundred.

In addition, there is basic, standard notation that Notion can display but is incapable of playing back, like fp and sfz, or octave tremolos. This forum is full of requests to make these work in playback. I think it is worth repeating that despite its shortcomings, Notion's forte is playback of notation. Other programs, like Finale and [the late, great?] Sibelius, concentrate on all the printed bells and whistles, at the expense of believable playback.

Still, if the dotted slur is an absolute must, there are two ways of getting it onto a Notion score; one high-tech and one low-tech:

1. Add the slur onto the PDF with editing software capable of this kind of thing.
2. Get out a pen and draw it on the printout.

Either solution should be satisfactory, as the dotted slur makes no difference in playback.

Best wishes,
Thorrild

Is this what you're trying to do?

Or this? (Either with or without the added (u) syllables...)

This is what I'm trying to do (done in paint very qiuckly and not meant to be perfect):

http://postimage.org/image/8l81598xx/

(Sorry I don't know how to show images in my posts)

I agree that dotted slurs are not the most basic thing you'll need in a notation software. But I don't see any reasons Notion should not have ambitions to be as good as Finale or Sibelius (or even better) when it comes to advanced notation. If Notion wants to have composers that want scores/sheet music for musicians, choirs, orchestras and even publishers, using it, it should work on this for the next version. I'm really happy I choosed Notion and I love how it works, but there's some minor (but important) things it should work on.

In modern music there's a lot of things beyond basic notation you might want. Accidentals in parentheses is one I'm missing already.

Maybe it could offer a choice between basic and advanced notation. So you could choose if u wanna see a "basic palette" or "advanced palette"