Re: Slur / phrasingSlur half dashed, half solid

[David Stocker]

> > 2. Does it (now) bother anyone else that dashed slurs do not look 
> > like real slurs? I guess I always assumed — without visually 
> > confirming, obviously — that dashed slurs were real slurs (that 
> > thickened and tapered, etc.) with cutouts; I now see that dashed 
> > "slurs" are simply dashed lines (of invariant thickness) which curve 
> > along the path that a slur would take between two notes. What is 
> > standard engraving practice when it comes to such things?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Kieren.
In older scores made with the program SCORE, dashed ties and slurs 
thickened in the middle as you describe and they looked good. In Finale, 
dashed-slurs have a similarly non-dynamic shape (that is, they don't 
thicken in the middle), and dashed ties aren't available at all, except 
by 'fooling' Finale by slurring two notes of the same pitch, and this is 
an ugly and time consuming process in Finale. Sibelius is similar.
> The publisher of my guitar music (Les Productions D'Oz in Quebec, 
> Canada) uses dashed slurs like these with invariant thickness to 
> indicate  pull-offs and hammer-ons, and uses regular slur markings for 
> phrase slurs.  I can't say that I've noticed dashed slurs in other 
> places before.  Sylvain (the editor at D'Oz) always uses these 
> dashed-line things, though.  It probably would look nicer if they 
> thickened in the middle and tapered at the ends. :)
In popular guitar-tab music, we use dashed-ties to connect held harmonic 
pitches over the bar line. I have also seen dashed-slurs to denote 
ligado technique in classical guitar music (and perhaps other string 
music, I can't recall).
> Jon
David