I work with a lot of cuban music, in which a VERY common pattern is four 16ths with the last one tied to the next beat like so
However sometimes I encounter errors like this which have come from an imported XML file.
There are a couple of problems here: stemlet beaming (which I have turned on by default) has somehow been overridden, and notes which ought to be simply tied together have been beamed over the barline. I don’t know what’s caused it as other instances of the exact same rhythm and beaming are unaffected.
The issue is: when I try to correct this by selecting the tied notes and using Edit>break beam, the beam is also broken with the other surrounding notes. If I try to fix THIS by selecting either the 1/4 note group before the barline or the one after and using Edit>beam together, it beams them once again over the barline. There seems to be no way of selecting only part of the tied-together notes for the purpose of beam editing.
Incidentally, I have selected the whole score and used Edit>reset appearance after importing, but this hasn’t fixed it for some reason.
If you want to select individual notes that are tied together, you have to do it in Engrave mode, not in Write mode.
In Write mode, you always select the complete “tie chain” - unlike some other notation programs, Dorico considers that to be a single note, independent of the way it is represented by tied notes.
I don’t know why you are getting beams across barlines.
I would try selecting all and resetting default beaming, note appearance, etc. Dorico may be weirdly interpreting manual commands from the source program.
That did the trick! I would have thought that the Reset Appearance in the main Edit menu would be the equivalent of the reset buttons in all its sub-menus. Weird
It’s quicker if you define a keyboard shortcut for “break beam”, instead of going through the menus. One mouse-click to select the note and one key-press to break the beam is pretty quick - but obviously it would be better not to do anything!
It would have to be for ‘beam together’, as selecting the beam itself in engrave mode and use ‘break beam’ doesn’t do anything. Also, break beam breaks ALL beams from the note, when what I want is to beam specifically to quarter-notes.
You can define custom key commands for both forcing and breaking beams. I am curious, however, by what you mean when you say “beam specifically to quarter notes”. Since quarters fundamentally can’t have flags, that doesn’t make sense to me.
I created a shortcut (cmd-B) to create beams and another (alt-B) to break them. It is very fast to use it : select all the notes you want to see beamed together, cmd-B and voilà. The break beam function is useful when writing vocal scores with the old habit (good or bad, this has been already discussed…) to break beams when the syllables change.
Hope it helps.
