Hello. Coming to Dorico from Finale (like many). I haven’t been able to find the answers to this problem, in fact i am not even sure of what nomenclature to use, so I include a picture. How do i do this:
Hello Jspeak,
a happy welcome to the Dorico forum.
And thank you for your notation example. What does this notation represent, is it a special sound effect or do you want to fill the bar with a beam without notes? A player will probably ask similar questions. Dealing with Dorico you will get a lot of questions “what is this suppose to mean”, because in Dorico the content comes first, then on a secondary level the display of it.
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This example is just to show that id like to know how to extend any individual beam from a beamed group. Through a bar or partial bar. There might be many reasons for wanting to do this. I have zero interest in the playback element, purely the graphic.
Probably the easiest way to make something like this is to enter notes that will give you the beams you’re looking for, and then using the Properties panel to hide just the stems and noteheads.
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Thanks, much appreciated !
Jspeak, excuse me for asking again, just out of my interest, what would be the intent for such a notation?
If there was no actual musical meaning to this, you could use the Line Tool to draw the extended beam. Afterwards remove the rests in this bar. Speaking of removing the rests, the bar will probably collapse, so you would probably better put some invisible notes into it.
First thing which came into my mind was actually, may be this is for a children’s music education book, where you have little birds sitting on a wire - representing the notes:
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OT: Like @k_b, I’m also really curious about what this means in your music. Not only is it not “intuitive” to me, it’s not even suggestive in a way I can imagine. Can’t wait to hear.
there is another aspect: how would this graphical speciality will translate to music.xml - so other softwares can read it? There must be a musical meaning - otherwise music.xml will have problems to store that information. Just thinking…
Interesting, the question of beam extension just came up in connection with:
Apparently, Dorico doesn’t have anything like Finale’s beam extension tool, so one can’t control the length of beams independently from the notes they are attached to.
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Sometimes you need to do odd notations for student completion or corrections etc. so things do not make complete musical sense because they are incomplete or wrong or showing steps …
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I used @Coranglais16 suggestion:
Once you hide the last stem, the beam will disappear all together. So this only stem I scaled to 1% and got the above result. One will need a bit of adjusting in Engrave mode though.
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This is brilliant advice, regarding the last stem, I hadn’t sat down and tried this yet so I would have no doubt come across this problem……, I am much obliged.
Thanks for pointing this out, hopefully the Dorico developers can facilitate a beam-extension tool. Lots of uses, just in 19th century music, millions of uses in 20th century music….
Jspeak,
if you don’t mind, could you just point us to an example, may be from the 19th century, so we can get an idea?
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Lots of uses, just in 19th century music, millions of uses in 20th century music….
I’m at a complete loss as to what this notation actually represents. Could you enlighten me (us)? I can’t remember ever seeing something like this and I’ve been reading scores for over 40 years …
With an added arrow could be like box notation. repeating the 4 notes.
Jesper
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But such an indication should use the box. This “beam extension” is a tool in Finale, which does not necessarily equate to a notation practice. @Jspeak, you will have to provide some published examples for the Dorico team to have a basis to build a feature.
And I’d (and no doubt a number of us) would love to see them too, @Jspeak, out of curiosity.
Well, firstly I wasn’t demanding you build a feature, however that would be great ! Ive found a solution that works for me. As regards what I might use it for, believe it or not there are a LOT of contemporary pieces out there that make use of it, but perhaps if you take a look at Schenker analysis charts (many of which were done in Finale) it might give you an idea of what it might be useful for. Sure, a lot of it can be produced using just graphics but if you are producing pages with music and analysis it’s very useful to just be able to elongate beams.
That’s what I was genuinely curious to see. As a composer who’s been around lots of scores over the years, I can’t remember ever having seen the “cantilevered” beam you showed us in the OP, so was selfishly hoping to see some examples. (Or were you just showing us the “idea” of extension through an exaggerated usage, without that hanging beam actually having an intended musical meaning?)
Your point about analytical graphs is well taken. (And I have made many of them in Finale in years past.) One definitely has to “push” Dorico for such things, since they don’t just defy, but inherently ignore music-notation semantics (since they’re not trying to be “music” per se, but use familiar musical symbols to encode very different meanings).
That said, a lot can be accomplished with “actual” beaming in Dorico using independent and hidden meters and/or open time sigs to get a beamed Quintzug, Baßbrechung, etc.
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