Currently, slash on beam is only automatically added to acciaccatura. It has however sometimes been used in recent music to indicate a very fast speed in unmeasured groups. Like this:
This is a regular semiquaver, followed by a groups of regular semibisquavers that I scaled to cue size. I then changed the beam spacing, and added a horizontal line as the beaming’s slash. (There is also a quarter rest, added as text).
Everything’s fine, but being able to show the slash as a property of any beamed group would be great!
What I’m trying to achieve is a bit different. Grace notes don’t take the space of the regular notes. I want the fake-grace groups to behave like regular notes, but appear as grace notes.
It is a way to say that those groups are not following an exact measured time, but are playing freely, as if they were grace notes not leading to any particular note, but to some unspecified ending.
It is a type of notation that is typical of Donatoni, and has become common in most of his disciples. Sort of controlled randomness.
Would anyone care to share their tips for a workaround to create these grace note-like unmeasured groups?
For example this I achieved either as rewriting an Ornament to a slash or creating a notehead with the offset slash. However, both methods are rather quirky and require manual adjustments.
