Tied notes and syncopation

Questions and Answers
1

Hey folks,

a long standing doubt i've had about mini-notation is how to do tied notes, and in particular, tied notes that produce syncopated rhythms (so for instance a note of one beat that starts half way through a beat and sustains across the beat boundary).

I was reminded of this today, when (for reasons of hyper-fixation) I spent a while trying to replicate the guitar melody from this caroline track in tidal.

Here's roughly what it's doing in traditional notation, at least to my ears (give or take an octave in pitch):

A bar of roughly scribbled sheet music
A bar of roughly scribbled sheet music1600×300 32.2 KB

(Note the tied A, D and C).

And here's the closest I got in Tidal:

d4 $ slow 2 $ n ("[c4 b3] [g3 a3] [~ d4] ~ ~ ~ [b2 fs3] [g3 c3] [~ c2]" |+ 12) # s "superpiano" # room 0.6

The issue is those rests - that A3, and the last C3 should sustain across the note boundary, as does the d4, which sustains over the next few notes, and i'm trying to work out how to express that in mini-notation.

I thought it might be the elongate (_) operator, but that doesn't seem to do quite what i expected, instead shifting the meter of the pattern in a weird way i can't quite describe (and it isn't even syntactically valid in two of the places above i'd expect to use it, eg [g3 a3] [_ d4] gives an error, which makes me think i've misunderstood its purpose slightly).

One way I can get it to work is explicitly patterning the sustain combinator with the note lengths i expect:

d4 $ slow 2 $ 
  n ("[c4 b3] [g3 a3] [~ d4] ~ ~ ~ [b2 fs3] [g3 c3] [~ c2]" |+ 12) 
  # sustain "0.5 [0.5 1] [~ 3.5] ~ ~ ~ 0.5 [0.5 1] [~ 0.5]"
  # s "superpiano" # room 0.6

...but I feel like i must be missing a trick here somehow. Is there any way to express this more concisely, within the "notes" pattern itself? To me, it's very much part of the rhythm of the phrase itself, rather than being a separate parameter.

Thanks a lot!

Tim

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2

Thanks for sharing this, I've been puzzled about ties in Tidal ever since I started using it! I'll test this out. Maybe there's a way to abstract this as a function, or add it to the mininotation? Also curious to see other folks' approaches to this.

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3

How about the other elongate operator, @? I can't test right now, but I think the above line could be expressed like so, with the tied notes hopefully working:

"c4 b3 g3 a3@2 d4@7 b2 fs3 g3 c3@2 c2"

(likely needs to be wrapped in a *2)

Edit: Tested it, and the following snippet sounds identical to your second example:

d4 $ slow 2 $ n ("c4 b3 g3 a3@2 d4@7 b2 fs3 g3 c3@2 c2" |+ 12) 
   # s "superpiano" # room 0.6
2 Likes
4

aaaaaaah, that's the one, thank you so much!

It's interesting that @ behaves differently to _ in that respect, since the documentation defines one in terms of the other - although I kinda get why, as we're also "unwrapping" the square bracket groups - I now realise that something like

"c4 b3 g3 a3 _ d4 _ _ _ _ _ _ b2 fs3 g3 c3 _ c2"

...would also work, with a fastor slow to compensate, as there'd be no syntax error, because no grouping.

Thank you!

1 Like