I was trying to find a more recent conversation about beam angles, but this seems the most appropriate to my question. I prefer the “Henle” beam angles mentioned above. I’ve gone through and set the ideal beam angles to 1 or less for all intervals, and I see no change in my score.
Am I missing something?
FYI, that is how it is in the style guide for one of the (major) publishers for whom I work. (Not Dorico. The style-guide was set in Score.)
I’ve moved your post into a new thread, rather than dredging up a thread that was last active four years ago, Stephen. Hope that’s OK!
In general you should certainly find that changing the settings in the Slants section of the Beams page of Engraving Options works as expected. An approximation of Henle’s rules for slants is to set an interval of a 2nd to 1/4 space, and all other intervals to 1/2 space. You should certainly see the beam slants in your project change after you make these adjustments and click Apply.
Thanks Daniel,
That’s better as long as the beam is completely within the staff. Those that protrude from the top or bottom line still have too much slope, and create wedges. See example below:
Is there another setting that will account for this?
Are you sure you changed everything other than a 2nd to 1/2?
When I do that, I get this result with no wedges:
Yes, I’ve changed everything, but there is no improvement here. There must be another setting somewhere that is forcing those stems to be longer, creating the wedges.
There are lots of interrelated settings for these. Engraving Options / Notes / Stems is another place to check. Check both the numerical values and the various Stem Shortening settings there as well.
I played with the stem shortening setting, and it made some better, some worse. I’m not sure which setting takes priority, but there are a few beams that didn’t move at all, and may have to be adjusted manually to avoid wedges.
It is possible that the problem is that to avoid the wedges some stems need to be lengthened rather than shortened. In this example, the left end should be lengthened, since moving the right end would make the E (bass clef) unacceptably short. It is more than the ideal slant, so I don’t know what is forcing that.
It’s really a mess of interrelated settings so finding a balance between the various settings is quite tricky. I’m not particularly a fan of Henle-style beams, but I really spent a lot of time trying to get my beams close to Ross-style. If you’re interested, there’s an even geekier notation forum where we’ve discussed this in this thread. You might find some of the Dorico beam angle info there valuable, or maybe help from other users that are also going for Henle-style settings.
I go with what my publishers prefer. The one with the explicit style guide would prefer a quarter- or half-step slope for the 16ths with the second beam starting on the bottom line with the right end dipping slightly below. Another of my publishers would prefer a horizontal beam whenever notes turn or stay the same, so this would get a horizontal (flat) beam. A third publisher just says avoid wedges, and that usually results in flatter beams.
I began as a Score user, which is probably more like Ross, but I was often asked for flatter beams than the default. Some publishers just don’t care, but most of the ones I have worked for do care. Henle is probably the most extreme in the “flatness stakes” with the exception of one who wants only flat beams, but that is for a specific purpose (neo-complexity composers).
For my own music, I have drifted towards a flatter, more gentle slope, which I’m finding is trending towards Henle, and I have found settings in Sibelius and Finale’s Patterson Beams plugin that give me what I want most of the time.
I’ll look at that thread you posted.
