I am trying to replicate the way a piece looks in the original, which means that NONE of the eighth notes are beamed together. Each eighth note is independent with its own flag.
The piece is from a hymnal, and I don’t want to stray from the original.
I looked through the notation settings and didn’t see a relevant setting. Am I missing it?
FWIW, the time signature is not noted in the original, but in Dorico, I made it as 2/4 piece.
Welcome to the forum, Amanda. There isn’t a global setting to keep all notes unbeamed*, but it’s a quick enough manual operation once you’ve input the notes: select all, then right-click and go to Beaming > Make Unbeamed. In the same submenu you can find several other commands to manually influence beaming, for which you can also set your own keyboard shortcuts if you find yourself using them frequently.
* Automatically beaming to the syllables in vocal music has been requested before, see Search results for 'syllabic beaming' - Steinberg Forums for some of the previous discussions.
Welcome to the forum, @amandaoboe ! Once you have selected the notes to unbeam, you can either go to Edit > Notations > Beaming > Make Unbeamed, or right-click (which gives you the Notations sub-menu right away) and select Beaming > Make Unbeamed as @hrnbouma suggested.
There is also Split Beam in the same menu (both forms of access), which is for breaking beams at a specific location. Make Unbeamed is easiest to use in your situation, where nothing is to be beamed at all. If you find that some notes should remain beamed but not others, such as in this example…
…then you would probably want to use a mix of the two functions. Of course, as mentioned above, you can set a custom keyboard shortcut for each, but these are such common tasks that standard shortcuts should be provided.
Unfortunately, Dorico provides no way to beam by syllable automatically (e.g., in the Notation or Engraving Options), or even in a one-click batch operation (hopefully also with a standard shortcut). I would prefer the former, but I would take the latter, as in Sibelius and Finale, as well (or even both?). I’m gratified that I’m not the only one to request something like this!
P.S. For the above example, in my humble opinion, separate beams communicate the “syllabic flow” far more clearly than slurs do—although I’ve also seen vocal music with neither!
But you can select a number of different notes and apply a split beam (or make unbeamed) operation to them all in one go.
