Grace Notes on time and before time

2007-05-30 09:25 am

Since my first experiences with nwc years ago I noticed, that all gracenotes are allways before the time. So the count starts on the grace notes and the following has its duration minus the grace notes.
But in music its necessary to have them right before the time, too. That the duration for the gracenotes ist substracted from the note/rest before it.

How do you do that, community?

Re: Grace Notes on time and before time

Reply #1 – 2007-05-30 10:09 am

G'day Steele,
this grace note is correctly called an acciaccatura, or crushed note - Strictly speaking, in modern usage, it is actually played simultaneously with the principle note and released almost immediately rather than stealing time from a preceding note.

For the sound you need to use an invisible, sounding staff and write out the notes explicitly. This is also necessary if you want a normal grace note (appogiatura) to behave properly instead of simply being a 32nd note that steals time from the following note. The appogiatura should consume half the time of the following note unless the following note is dotted in which case it steals 2/3rds.

For display of the acciaccatura you should also have a grace note with a slash across it's stem and flag...

Two ways to do this:
a) place a normal grace note and then place a text entry with a "/" positioned in the correct place - you may need some spaces to pad the horizontal position. I suggest you test justification at next note/bar.

b) there are pre-defined slashed grace notes in several fonts which you can place as text. It is the character displayed when the "=" is used in Boxmark2, as well as my 3 suites; SwingDings, MusikDingsSans and MusikDingsSerif.

All 4 fonts are available via the Scripto - the are other grace notes available in other fonts too, but these ones match the system fonts of NWC or the suites they are included with.

Re: Grace Notes on time and before time

Reply #2 – 2007-05-30 06:11 pm

My thoughts on this subject:

NWC2 should allow a slash on an unbeamed grace note. Using text is messy.
If possible, a slashed note should steal time from the prior regular note/rest.
A slur into a regular note should seek the closest pitch rather than the top/bottom pitch.
A muted grace note should be ignored rather than become a rest. An invisible grace rest could be used if the current behaviour is desired.
Small notes, by their nature are ambiguous. No default playback style is likely to be correct in many if not most cases.