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I'm trying to adapt a guitar piece to the piano. The piece, shown here, is in 3/4.
I've never seen this bit of notation before and I initially thought it was the indicator telling you to play 3 notes in 2 similar notes' worth of time, but it covers two quavers, so it can't be that. The notes without the rest seem to add up to 3 as well.
It's definitely a mess; there are a couple of notational aspects that suggest the person that did this is not well-versed in notational norms.
Listening to the recording on the website you listed in the comments, it's clear that the triplet figure should encompass the first three eighth notes, not just the first two. (Indeed, there is a weird 3 above the stem-up pitch.) Here's a better way of notating this:
But I think it's actually more difficult than that. The piece is pretty clearly in 6/8, but the person notated it in 3/4 (!). The more "correct" notation would be something like this:
This latter notation looks odd, but that's because it's an odd rhythm. I recommend you slow it down enough so that you can focus on each eighth note (i.e., think of it as six notes in a measure, not a large duple measure). Once you're comfortable with that, then speed it up to get the real 6/8 duple feel.
We could try to guess what that notation meant, but it would only BE a guess. If the two bars are supposed to be the same length, the two dotted 8s add up to... No, I'm not even going to try. It's a mess. Just possibly if you showed us the whole page, or at least a whole line of music it might make sense.
