I wrote a piece of music. I started with a 4/4 signature, but now it’s finished I want to change the first bar to a 1/16 pick up. Can’t find out how to do it. Entering a new meter with a pickup shifts the entire piece. So that’s not it. Shifting the whole piece one 16th to the right and creating the pickup might work, but that’s more how I Finale expect to handle this 
.
Is there a clever way?
Welcome to the forum, Robert.
The quickest way I can think of is still two steps:
- Edit the existing time signature to 4/4,0.25
- (With the time signature still selected) Shift+B 1x Enter
Really struggling with this, the best I can get is a bar with an 8th note, so I need a pickup note of a 16th and get a rest as shown, but cannot delete all the rests on the other instruments, stubbornly refuses to delete the rests on Accordion. Pix attached. There really needs to be a simpler way to add a pickup bar after score has been created, often an afterthought. I cannot remember exactly how I got this now, a lot of fiddling around adding time sig to second bar, then removing…
It is very easy to add a pick-up bar, using the procedure Leo describes above. If it doesn’t work for you as described, you know what to do.
It would be nice if one could use 4/4,1x rather than have to figure out the fraction.
Also, if Insert mode is on, maybe add the pickup - making step 2 unnecessary?
So Leo’s method worked in 4/4, but I just tried it as an experiment in another flow at 3/4. I entered 3/4,0.50 intending to get a quaver pickup, which I got but unfortunately the music that I’d already entered in bar 1 was now out of sync, and adding the extra bar made it worse. Am I missing something here? It seems to be inconsistent or I’m doing something very wrong!
I suspect you misread my instructions.
2) Doesn’t say “add a bar”. It says “Shift+B +1x” (where x = a 16th note). In this case you need +1e (where e = an eighth note).
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Ah thanks Leo, that works - yes, I must have mis-read the procedure.
Cheers
Simon
However, I am unable to find the letter for a 16th note, it is not “s”, it is not the next letter in the alphabet from 8th note = “e” so “f” - hmm, what’s the protocol here if not first letter of note value? Not at all intuitive, to me at least…
Cheers
Simon
Simon, read my last post, then read it again…
Ah OK - where “x” is so often used to denote a variable, sorry - yes I was not interpreting your post literally, my mistake, but I suggest that this is not intuitive, e, x, I cannot see the logic in e for an 8th and x for a 16th. Ah yes, in the manual, we have w, h, q, e, and - x…hmmm.
w = whole
h = half
q = quarter
e = eighth
x = 16th
y = 32nd
z = 64th
My guess is that the problem with “s” is that it’s the first letter of sixteenth and sixtyfourth, and (just to confuse those of us in Britain), semiquaver (16th) and semibreve (whole).
I have no idea whether this is listed anywhere in the manual, but I’ve picked it up along the way…
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See https://steinberg.help/dorico/v3/en/dorico/topics/write_mode/write_mode_tuplets_popover_r.html
I don’t thing there is much logic to x, except that 16th, 32nds and 64ths are x y and z. I suppose 16ths and 32nds could have been s and t instead - and then u for 64ths?
OK thanks for the table - that’s great. I’ll stop complaining now. I’m not much of a formula kind of guy so anything with arbitrary letters and plus or minus signs tends to scare me off…! Thanks for all the input.