Uneven Beam with Long Syllable in Lyrics
I wouldn't characterize this is a bug, just something that is sub-optimal and I'm hoping there is a way to work around it.
When dealing with a mixture of long and short syllables within a beam, the beam winds up being highly variable (horizontally). In the attached file you can see that the 1st three 32nd notes are bunched closely together... the first 1/32 is a continuation of the last note of the previous system (not sure why the underline from that lyric isn't appearing, but that's a minor concern), the 2nd is the syllable "a", and the 3rd is the syllable "round".
"Round" causes a large gap between the 3rd and 4th 32nd notes. Then the rest of the measure is tightly spaced together.
On published sheets of the same song, I've seen this handled one of two ways:
1) The beam is spaced based on the largest syllable. It's stretched out more than is necessary, but it's even.
2) Because "round" is continued across multiple notes, it's actually not necessary to stretch the beam, but rather "round" (the word itself, not just the subsequent underline) is situated under multiple notes. Basically, they are looking ahead and not stretching out the beam when the subsequent notes are just going to have an underline anyway.
Is there a way to implement one of these two solutions? Any other suggestions? Thanks!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| uneven beam due to uneven syllables.jpg | 14.78 KB |
Comments
You can use Edit Mode (double click a notehead, arrow keys to nudge) to space the notes more how you like it, at least to some extent. I didn't have any trouble reproducing your example and then respacing the notes as in your 2) above. 1) is trickier but could probably be done with patience, also use of the "additional leading/trailing space" option in Note Properties (right click menu). But I think 2) looks better, too, so the fact that it is also easier is a plus as far as I am concerned.
In reply to You can use Edit Mode (double by Marc Sabatella
Edit Mode worked. It was a bit tedious since I then had to manually shuffle around the notes in the other voice, including for the remainder of the measure, but it worked OK.
I looked at lateral thinking idea too, but wound up not doing that because it wound up being much too closely spaced together, which is definitely just a personal preference sort of thing.
Thanks for the help!
...Instead of fooling around with the notes to make them look good you can fool around with the text. I have entered the lyrics here by a combination of letters and [Ctrl]-Spacebar (which prints a space rather than leaping to the next lyric syllable).