6/8 inconsistent beaming of eighth notes with rests between them

Dorico
1

I have an extended section of 6/8 bars, where a number of them have three eighth notes, each separated by eighth note rests. In some cases they are beamed as individual eight notes with no

Beamed as individual eighth notes

In other cases, they are instead beamed with the first two eighth notes together, and the rest between them, in a format I find quite surprising:

Beamed together for the first two eighth notes but not the last

I have exported a single instrument showing this issue and deleting literally everything else from the score:

weird beaming.dorico (1.3 MB)

In both cases, they are in the same voice within the instrument (all just Up-stem Voice 1). These are about four bars apart in the original score, with no difference (that I know of) in how they were entered. The properties of the notes are all identical, as are the properties of the rests. This behavior appears in all bars of the score which have these rhythms, so it’s also not something instrument-specific I have done, though I may well have done it in one instrument and copied it to the others before changing pitches etc.

Once the second pattern starts appearing in the score, normal note entry continues to use that second form into the first. However, if I copy the first one to the bar the second appears in, it keeps the beaming from the first one after pasting (i.e. “fixes” it not to be like the second one any more).

Anyone have any tips of where I should look? I can of course “just” copy and paste to solve this, but it would be nice to figure out why it happened and how to fix it more correctly!

2

This could be from an import, or you have accidentally re-beamed.

One thing that Dorico shares with other notation software is the fact that there is no way to see if beaming has been forced in a given passage, unless you reset the beaming to notation defaults. This reduces signpost clutter and having markers for this would not really help in the long run.

So I selected the passage, right-clicked, selected Beaming, then “Reset Beaming” (actually I have shift-gtrl-alt-b as a shortcut), and lo and behold, the passage re-beamed as your second example. If you want your flow to show the first option consistently, go to Notation Options (ctrl-shift-n), select “Beam Grouping” on the right, go to “Beams and rests” and select the option that prevents beaming over rests. Otherwise, you may choose to force beaming manually by selecting one of the first two 8th notes, right-clicking, and select "Beaming>Make unbeamed (my shortcut is ctrl-shift-B), if you only need it in a few instances, but want beams over rests for most of the flow.

3 Likes
3

Thank you; Reset Beaming is exactly what I was looking for but did not know the name of. I’ll reset the beaming and decide later how I want the beaming to be done.

Thinking on it: I suspect that this is related to an import—I had forgotten until thinking about it in the context of this reply that I started this in StaffPad 3 years ago and imported it via MusicXML. That must be the source of the difference!

1 Like