Glissandos

Glissandos are created by adding an H to the starting note of the glissando, and an h on the ending note. The maximum gliss interval is one octave above/below the starting note of the glissando. Glissandos larger than that will not be rendered correctly due to General MIDI limitations for pitch-bend depth.

Adding an underscore to a note will prevent a glissando from reattacking at that note.

The underscore character can be placed before or after the ratio, and it can also be used to indicate tied notes (useful for when representating standard music notation more closely):

Pitchbend update rate

When doing glissandos quickly on large intervals, the individual pitchbend adjustments may become audible. By default, pitchbend updates for glissandos occur once every 50 milliseconds (and faster or slower based on the tempo adjustments in the timeline).

The pitchbend update rate can be set by adding *grate:# (meaning glissando rate), where # is a positive integer indicating the update rate in units of milliseconds (but will be modified based on tempo adjustments of the timeline).

In the following example, notice the graininess of the first glissando. This is fixed for the second one, where the update rate is lowered from 50 ms to 10 ms. For the third glissando, the update rate is changed to 250 ms, which will update the pitchbend values for the glissando once every quarter second. Then the rate is set to 1/5 and 1/10 of a second respectivly for the last two glissandos.

Other examples

Here is an example of starting at a 5/4 major third, and then glissandoing to a 400c major third and back again, with and without the reference pitch:

Here is an example of glissandoing up and down a pythagorean comma from a note:

Going from a unison to a first-inversion major triad and back again:

Simulating vibrato: