Request: Slashed Beams for Regular (Non-Grace) Notes
Hi all,
I’d love to see support for slashed beams on regular, full-size notes in a future version of Dorico.
Currently, Dorico automatically applies slashed beams to grace notes, which is excellent. But in many contemporary, orchestral, and Romantic-era scores, there are cases where a composer wants to notate slashed beams on regular notes — to indicate passages that should be played as fast as possible, or quasi-cadenza, while still appearing as full-size, rhythmic notes (not grace notes).
Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a native way to apply slashes to the beams of regular notes. I’ve tried a few workarounds. One is using grace notes scaled to full size, but they don’t participate in rhythmic spacing or playback. Another is faking slashes using manual graphic symbols or lines, but this is time-consuming and not ideal for editing or layout changes.
A dedicated property — something like “Beam style: Slashed” for any beamed group — would be incredibly useful. Even just repurposing the existing grace-note beam style for regular note beams would do the trick.
Has anyone else found a better workaround, or is this already on the development roadmap?
Thanks,
Michael Matthews