Here’s a hopefully foolproof recipe for headless noteheads:
- Choose Engrave > Notehead Sets
- In the left-hand list, click the + button to create a new notehead set from scratch; don’t base it on an existing one.
- Give the set a suitable name, e.g. ‘Headless Noteheads’.
Note: You will see that the grid of noteheads contains a single notehead: don’t edit this one. That’s the default black notehead also used by other notehead sets. Editing that will change black noteheads in many other notehead sets. This is powerful, because it means you can reuse noteheads in different sets in different combinations, without having to constantly redesign them, but you do need to be aware that this is what’s going on. So:
- Click the + button in the action bar at the bottom of the dialog on the right-hand side to add a new notehead to the set. This looks the same as the first one, but it’s a new one.
- Select the first notehead in the grid (the default one) and click the arrow pointing out of the box to the right to remove it from the set. You should now be left with just your new black notehead.
6, Click the pencil icon in the action bar at the bottom of the dialog to edit the notehead. - Select the notehead in the editor and click the trashcan icon to remove it.
- On the right-hand side, click the ‘Text’ character, and then choose ‘font.defaultMusic’ as the font style.
- Enter one or two space characters into the edit control, and click ‘Add Text’ to add your two spaces to the notehead.
- Click OK to confirm your changes to the notehead.
- Make sure you set your new notehead to be used for all durations (e.g. all durations of a quarter and shorter, and for all durations of a quarter and longer).
- Click OK to confirm your changes to the notehead set.
You should now be able to assign your new ‘Headless Noteheads’ set to existing notes in the project via the Edit > Notehead submenu.