In the score I’m working on, three of the four instruments play grace notes before the very first beat of the piece. I like it that way, but the grace notes don’t play on playback. Playback is not essential for this score, but I’d still like to have it work.
One solution is to add an eighth note to the measure, perhaps even just an upbeat, which is a little strange for this piece because there are hardly any cases of two measures in a row with the same meter in the whole piece, and the concept of an upbeat is out of place in this sort of music. The only reason I would do it is so that my grace notes will play on playback. I don’t really want to do that if there is another way to get those grace notes to play.
For fun I opened a scratch project and wrote something that begins with grace notes and that repeats the first two bars. Naturally, it doesn’t play them the first time but does on the repeat. That’s what I suspected would happen.
But even if I decide a one-eighth silent upbeat is the solution, I don’t know how to insert that easily. I looked at the Popover Reference under the Bars and Barlines section near the beginning, but nothing there works. Is there a way to add bars to the left of the carat? I don’t see how.