editing note beam in pickup measure

• Aug 24, 2018 - 09:29

I have a score in 12/8 time which is counted in 4 groups of 3, not 3 groups of 4 in my case.
Weirdly enough the pickup measure has 4 12th counts. And musescore connects the first 3 nodes with a common banner rather than the final 3, as shown in the first attachment Screen Shot 2018-08-24 at 10.20.23.png . However, it works fine in a normal measure as shown in the second attached image Screen Shot 2018-08-24 at 10.21.58.png . Notice how the last 3 notes are tied with the common beam. How can I change this in the pickup measure?


Comments

In reply to by mike320

Hi Mike, I had a node which ended the beam. I clicked on "do not end beaming on this note" and that DIDN'T end the beaming. To me that says, the effect is not what the label says. But when I clicked "start a second beam level at this note" it create the single beam that I wanted.

In reply to by jim.newton.562

Although it is a minor issue, I think the note grouping is wrong for pickup measures especially when the pickup measure has an unusual number of beats. It seems to start counting forward from the start of the measure. Instead it should count backward from the end of the measure. https://musescore.org/en/handbook/time-signatures#time-sig-properties
My score is in time signature 12/8. My pickup measure has 4 1/8th counts. The default beaming connected the first three 1/8th notes and let the 4th stranded. It should have connected the final 3 1/8th notes and left the first one stranded.

In reply to by jim.newton.562

Since you are using only pictures I can only guess what you might have done wrong. To make a note beam to the next note, you must click the next note and change it to Beam Middle. This is what the context help (words in the yellow box) calls it. This will enable it to connect to the previous note. There are only three reasons a note does not connect to the previous one.

  1. The previous note is set to "No beam"
  2. The next note is set to "No beam"
  3. The next note is set to "Beam start"

There is technically a fourth reason and that is that the time signature has set one of these beaming properties and either you did nothing or reset them to auto.

If you want a better explanation of what you are doing wrong, select the first two measures and use the menu File->Save selection and attach the new file here. Or you can just attach the whole score, I can find the first two measures easy enough.

In reply to by jim.newton.562

Here is the fixed file

God_Walks_the_Dark_Hills.mscx

I made the dotted 8th "Beam Start" and the last 8th Beam Middle.

If you look at the time signature properties (right click time signature and choose Time signature properties) you will see this is how the last 4 8th notes are set up. You have to do a little counting to see this, but count from the right not the left and it will be easier. The first 8th note is irrelevant since the second one starts a new beam.

On a very related topic, IMHO you should not need to do this. The problem is the beaming algorithm used in pickup measures. Rather than using the last x number of beats to beam a pickup measure, it uses the first x beats to beam the measure. You should logically get the beaming you want by default.

In reply to by mike320

Yes, I agree. The problem is we don't special case "pickup measure", and actually for most other places where a measure has an actual duration different from nominal, what we do does make sense. It will mainly turn out to be wrong for pickups or measures that were split in two for whatever reason (to insert a mid-measure repeat, to start the second half of the measure on the next system, etc). Ideally, we should probably try to special case this based on, hmm, maybe "for measures at the start of a system, work backwards"?

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