I want to make a project that looks like the attached picture. The vocal line is in stemless notes to convey the free rhythmic feel of Gregorian chant, but the accompaniment uses normal stemmed notes. I’ve gotten the stemless notes, but my problem is that since I used quarter and half notes in the vocal line (so that it looks like the example below), I can’t use eighth notes in the accompaniment line and still have them line up. What is the best way of doing this? Is there a way to make a quarter note look like a half note so I could just halve the note values of the vocal line and change the appearance of the notes at the end of phrases?
For the eighths, just use eighth notes. There’s a Hide Stem property in the Engrave mode properties panel that will hide the beams in addition to the stems.
For the final note, if you’re happy with a half note notehead, you could input a 2:1 quarter note tuplet and then use a half note. If you want something fancier then switch the note into a different notehead set (from the Edit or right-click menu).
Okay, I tried the tuplet method, but that also causes the organ part to become unaligned with the vocal part since the organ playing a quarter note isn’t the same duration as the tuplet half note.
I looked at the notehead sets, but all I could see is various special noteheads, and no way to just make it look like a normal notehead but with a different value than the actual value.
To be clear, this isn’t just at the last note of the piece; it’s at the end of each phrase. So it happens a few times.
You want a custom notehead set that uses the existing half-note notehead for quarter notes. Use the Notehead Set editor to create a new notehead set based off of the “Larger” set, and name it something useful (mine is called “Chanty Noteheads”). Then set the half-note notehead to be used for quarter-note durations (and the black notehead to be used for eighth-note and shorter durations). Then, if you change the notehead set for that player for the flow to “Chanty Noteheads”, it will always use the half-note notehead for quarter notes.
Okay, so, this seems like it will work… But when I create the “chanty noteheads” set based on “larger,” and set the half-note notehead to be used for quarter note duration, it changes that in the original “larger notehead” set as well. I’m looking in the manual and it has a note saying:
“If you edit a notehead that appears in multiple notehead sets, your changes affect its appearance in all notehead sets that contain it.”
How do I get around this? And out of curiosity, why is this the case at all? Obviously I’m mistaken somehow, but it seems like this makes creating new notehead sets entirely pointless if it forces the older one to change as well…
Ok, you’ll need to duplicate the noteheads in question and then edit the duplicates. Sorry, I should have mentioned that 
This is to allow the same notehead to be used in multiple notehead sets. I can see how that makes sense, but in practice it’s meant an extra step or two of work to get things done.
Another option is to simply input the final accompaniment chord as quarter notes, which will leave quarter rests at the end of the bar, and then select “remove rests” and they will disappear. I abuse this allll the time in my chant and psalm transcriptions. Piece of cake.
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Ok, you’ll need to duplicate the noteheads in question and then edit the duplicates. Sorry, I should have mentioned that
That did the trick, thank you!