On some of my old sheet music, before computers, there is a short cut for tremolos. Instead of all those 32nd notes, there is just a quarter note with 3 slashes to represent the a,m,i part of the tremolo. Last winter I bought Finale Print Music, and after several frustrating attempts, I've finally recreated that short cut.
First put in the base lines (thumb parts) in the 1st and 2nd voices. Then in the 3rd voice, put in a 32nd rest, then a quarter note with the stem pointing up. Go to the tuplet menu, then center the cursor over the notehead and click to open the dialog box. In the dialog box, make it "1 quarter note in the space of 3 32nd notes". Unclick the number and bracket boxes, and when you click okay it will set the value of the quarter note to be the 3 32nd notes. Then go to the articulation tool, center the cursor over the notehead, and click. Highlight box 31 which is the 3 slashes. When you click select, it will put the 3 slashes on the notehead. Then center the cursor over the little box (they call it a handle) and you can move the 3 slashes up a little to look correct.
You have to go through the entire process with each note. Obviously it's going to take a lot more time to input the notes this way. The end result is a tremolo that is not cluttered. You can get 3 or maybe 4 measures to a staff, so that something like Sueno en la floresta could be cut down to 6 pages instead of 10.
I think it's easier to look at and easier to read. There's no need to have all those extra notes cluttering up the page when you can shorten the notation and shorten the number of pages necessary.
Maybe those of you using Lilypond or Adobe can do some experimenting to get it to work in those systems.
How many of you have seen tremolos done this way in sheet music?
I'm interested in knowing if any of you can get it to work in Adobe or Lilypond.
Ken Thompson
1970 R3 Ramirez