For your general information, I have submitted the following look at trills in woodwinds to Notion, along with a feature request concerning trills in general. Your comments are welcome:
I just had occasion to wrestle with the woodwind trills in Notion 4 (Mac). They turn out to be all over the map as far as playback is concerned:
I made a simple test file (attached) to demonstrate the variety of trill playback in most of the woodwind samples. The same generic trill figure is played by a succession of samples for comparison:
Flute: Some delay before trill starts. Trill begins on base note (modern style).
Flute Duo: No discernable delay before trill starts. Trill starts on upper trill note (Baroque style trill)
Flute Section: No delay before trill starts. Baroque style trill. Faster (and, to me, better) trill speed.
Oboe: Ample delay before trill starts. Modern style trill.
Oboe Duo: Slight delay before trill starts. Baroque style trill.
Clarinet: Way too much delay before trill starts. (four-beat trill added just to demonstrate that it actually works). Modern style trill.
Clarinet Duo: Slight or no delay before trill starts. Modern style trill (as opposed to all other Duo samples so far).
Clarinet Section: No delay before trill starts. Impossible for me to hear if this is Modern or Baroque style trill.
Bassoon: Some delay before trill starts. Modern style trill.
Bassoon Duo: No delay before trill starts. Baroque style trill. (Btw, the sample sounds really woolly and wimpy compared to the solo Bsn.)
I did not test the rest of the woodwind section, but I would imagine you'll find similar strange variations.
I understand that it may be desirable not to have every sample in the section trilling in the same fashion, but shouldn't they be just a little closer in stylistic approach, speed and amount of delay?
For the future, I'd like to advocate for user-adjustable trills, similar to what fermatas and caesuras are now. You would double-click on a trill to determine delay, speed and starting pitch; maybe you could also set whether the trill should have a flat, sharp or natural next to its symbol, instead of making them three distinct, un-editable symbols as they are now.
The test file I mentioned is attached here: (Note that it only plays back as intended if you have Notion's woodwind expansion sounds.)
Woodwind trills.notion- (134.17 KiB) Downloaded 288 times
Best wishes,
Thorrild
