Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge Question: Any way to notate "rolling" notes in a score? (PDF)

Hello all!

I'm currently working on a piece that I'm also trying to score. As far as playing a series of "rolling" eighth notes with my left hand is concerned, I've got two basic techniques to choose from:

(1) Use my fingers to keep the notes held down longer, or (2) be lazy and use the pedal. I know I should not use the pedal for this, but when using the sequencing software to help me produce a score, I noticed that using the pedal produces a "cleaner" looking score:

http://www.mediafire.com/?xmyzkdzlghe

Since this is fairly basic stuff here (yes, I'm still trying to get the hang of all this), my inclination is to notate using the eighth notes without any pedaling information. Would that be the way to go, or is there another way to notate this?

Thanks for any help... the score always proves to be difficult for me.

dave

Option 2 is best. Using the pedal isn't lazy, it's there for a reason!

Something to do is to keep scores around that are similar to what you're writing and refer to them. Try to find scores published by established publishers and follow the same conventions - that will ensure that your scores can be read by a wide audience.

LOL! I didn't mean that it's *always* lazy to use, I just thought it was in this case since it's also going to affect the notes I'm playing in my right hand. But, I'm happy to hear what you are saying because it certainly is a lot easier (for me at least) to use the pedal here.

I know for recording it's not that big of a deal because I can always put the left hand on one track and the right on another. But with regards to a score and a human player, I just wanted to know what was more acceptable.

That's a really good idea. I'll be looking out for one like this.

Thanks a lot for you input!
dave

I agree that using the pedal isn't 'laziness', but it IS 'different' from legato. Is there a compelling reason you've notated in 4/8? You may get a cleaner look with 2/4.

Actually, now that I think about it, it was a fairly uncompelling reason: the baseline consists of four eighth notes per measure. That's it. I was going to revisit this issue later, but now that you bring it up, let me revisit it now.

I want the first eighth note in each measure to get the stress, so 2/4 would accomplish that, right? It would be:

*1* and 2 and

Whereas in 4/8, the first note gets stressed, but the third note gets some additional stress as well:

*1* 2 *3* 4

OK, so it looks like 2/4 is actually what I want to use. Why did this seem so difficult before?

Thanks for bringing that up. Of course, if there are any errors in my logic here, please feel free to let me know.

Thanks again,
dave