grace-quarter, grace-8th, grace-16th, grace-32nd

[ChrisHeinen]

I'm wanting to put grace notes into the score, and I was expecting the duration of the note to vary based on whether I selected "quarter", "8th", "16th" or "32nd". I don't hear any difference, though. Are these 4 choices of note duration for display-only purposes, or should I hear a difference during playback?

Thanks,
CH

[Admin]

Hi Chris,

Grace Notes are really more of a visual cue. They are not meant to change in duration. Mostly, duration changes to the way that grace notes are written are stylistically used throughout a piece of music.

For instance, if it is a single grace note, it will usually be written as an eighth note grace note or if there are two grace notes, they are usually written as sixteenths and so on down the list.

The key to understanding this is that grace notes are not written to fit in time specifically, but rather to fit in between time. They usually come before a beat or maybe on a beat, but are meant to be played more quickly than could more easily be notated. They serve as a visual cue more than a division of time.

The reverse of this would be that if a composer wants something played in a set period of time, they will normally just write out the duration in the score. So, if they have a duration amount, they are no longer grace notes.

-Admin

[dcd111]

But in Notion, they are actually NOT just visual cues. They affect Notion's playback (as they should). But it is very counter-intuitive that the time Notion takes to play two sixteenth grace notes don't fit within the same time as one eighth grace note. Especially because Notion cuts off the previous note earlier and plays these notes back before the beat of the "regular" note that the grace notes are attached to, so this can have some very strange results.

In other words, a decision has been made by Notion's designers that a grace note takes some arbitrary but specific duration of time. But instead of allowing us to adjust that decision by changing the note duration, Notion just multiplies that arbitrarily chosen duration by the number of grace notes, regardless of whether those grace note are written as eighth notes, sixteenth notes, etc. So four grace notes always take four times as long for Notion to play as one grace note. This means that multiple grace notes do NOT fit "in between time", because they take too long to play based on the way Notion interprets them, and can actually interfere with the preceding beat.

I would recommend that Notion interpret grace notes with some specific duration based on one eighth note grace note (say, the same as a thirty-second note, or whatever time Notion is currently using for any grace note), and divide that interpreted duration from there based on the notated duration of the grace notes.

I'd also like to add here that it would be great if we could test for grace notes in custom rules. There is a technique that can be checked, but that only works for the express entry technique that actually writes the word "grace" on the score, and this technique test NOT triggered by an actual grace note. This is especially frustrating because you can't apply express entry techniques to grace notes, so you can't even use the work-around of designating a grace note as a grace note. Unfortunately, only notes that are definitely not grace notes can be designated as grace notes.

[ChrisHeinen]

Thanks dcd111 and Admin, I think I get it now.

If I'm hearing you both correctly, I cannot specifically tell Notion to play a grace note with a duration of my choice (as a single note). If I want that effect, I should just write it as standard notation and not use a grace note.

The only reason I bring it up is that in a slow piece, it seemed to me that the grace notes were also rather long duration (perhaps because Notion is "scaling" the duration based on tempo ???). I wanted the grace notes to be a bit shorter, so I (mistakenly) thought the solution was to use a smaller value on the grace note).

Is there a process we can follow to request an enhancement to this? For example, I can double click things like dynamic marks and choose "+10" or whatever to have Notion play it slightly louder than the "default" then I can "view hidden items" to see those tweaks. Could Notion be enhanced in some way to vary durations in grace notes? Just a thought...

[thorrild]

Hi Chris, et al.:

I have long hoped for an improvement of Notion's playback handling of grace notes, and I've submitted feature requests to bolster my hopes. Grace notes are defined, at least in Kurt Stone's notation bible, as being played as fast as possible, regardless of their value and the tempo of the score. Currently, Notion's grace notes are played as 32nd notes (as far as I can detect), and that is mostly okay, if the tempo is bright and snappy. However, if the score is slow or even just moderate, the grace notes begin to sound sluggish, and the need to adjust their value arises. I'd also like to have some way of making grace notes "speak" better. Depending on the instrument (and, again, on the tempo), it can be difficult or impossible to make them audible, even if strong accents are applied and hidden. In my opinion, grace notes are typically (but not always!) played louder than the held note they precede, so volume and attack adjustment would be welcome too.

And then there are those scores where a grace note gesture is indicated slow... Ugh.

Best wishes,
Thorrild

[Admin]

But, there is a way to change the duration of playback of Grace Notes.

Press TAB and open the sequencer overlay. You can then drag the duration and start time of the Grace Notes to the desired location for proper timing and playback.

One of the difficulties of programming grace note functionality is that you must assume some rule to be true, always. Beyond that you must allow users to edit the way that they function. The way that we have this set up is that grace notes always play in some specified time, ie., 32nd notes and they happen before the beat. Then, if you follow the method above, that is, Sequencer Overlay, you can acheive the desired playback times.

The only other real problem after that is, what do you do at the beginning of a piece that you are writing if you are using grace notes to start the piece? Well, there is a solution, albeit not so pretty. Create a pickup measure.

-Admin

[wcreed51]

+1 for test for grace notes in custom rules. VSL has grace note patches.

[thorrild]

@Admin:
Thanks, as always, for detailing the flexibility of Notion. However, I cannot get any results using your instructions. I can adjust the gray duration bar (well, sort of) of gracenotes, but it doesn't change playback for me. When I drag the bars around, they "jump" a bit, and I can't really tell whether I'm dragging the beginning or the end of them, even at maximum display zoom. Anyway, I don't hear any difference in playback. Enclosed is a test file of some lovely clarinet music by Anton Webern, using Notion's standard Clarinet sample. I'd be interested to hear if you can affect the gracenotes in any way. I can't.

Best wishes,
Thorrild

s gracenotes.notion

(23.13 KiB) Downloaded 348 times

[ChrisHeinen]

I'm afraid that I had the same experience as thorrild described. When I tried to adjust the duration of grace notes with the sequencer overlay, no amount of shortening or lengthing the gray bars of the grace notes made an audible difference on playback.

One odd thing I noticed is that after adding a grace note, hitting TAB to display the sequencer overlay, zooming in to max resolution, and clicking and dragging the right "edge" of a sequencer overlay grace note oval, the oval's LEFT edge is what began to move (instead of the right edge, like on a regular note). Weird.

It is good to hear Admin indicate that this technique to change grace note duration SHOULD work, though. So, hopefully in a maintenance update we can start using it.

Thanks,
CH

[thorrild]

Let's hope that this feature, when it is hooked up and working properly, will work not only for single grace notes, but also for multiple. It would be a shame if a manual shortening of one grace note in a group would create a hole in the playback of the gesture.

Best,
Thorrild