Drums - evenly spaced HHs + horizontal beams

• Mar 30, 2017 - 03:57

(1) Horizontal Beams
My kick & snare are in voice 2 with stems downwards. When a kick & snare are beamed together Musescore defaults to a slanted beam. Can I make it *default* to horizontal?

(2) Evenly Spaced Hi Hats
When my kicks & snare line up with HH 8ths then the HHs are evenly spaced. As soon as a kick or snare lands between the HHs (on a 16th note) the hi hat spacing is spoilt (widened for that one gap.) Can I get Musescore to make the 8ths evenly spaced out?

Thanks in advance,
Steve W


Comments

You can make *all* beams default to horizontal, via Style / General / Beams. But that won't be good if your score contains other instruments. Instead, wait until you are done entering notes, then select all beams on the drum staff (eg, right click one, Select / All Similar Elements on Same Staff), then flatten them at once using the Inspector.

As for your spacing question, I don't understand. MuseScore uses standard spacing, where eighths take more space than sixteenths, but not as much as two sixteenths. You shouldn't normally violate this standard. Is there some sort of special non-standard notation you are trying to create? Can you post an example and explain in more detail what you are trying to do and why?

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thank you Marc. Often I will be using MuseScore for just Drum Set parts. So having all beams default to horizontal beaming is perfect for that. Thanks for your help.

In drum notation it is very common for the 8ths on the Hi Hats to be spaced out evenly, even when there are 16ths on the kick / snare falling in between the Hi Hats. This is particularly helpful to beginner drum students as it reinforces the expectation that they are played evenly.

Once the students progress they can come to handle the many and varied other ways of writing drum music, and indeed music for any other instrument. But it's very helpful to keep things simple for the beginners. This is what I'm trying to achieve.

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In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Genius. My aim is to get every student reading music and playing well, as soon as possible, and with the least amount of effort ... because once the student realises that it's not that hard, they can then envision being good at it. And once that happens, it's all down hill from there.

Thanks very much,
Steve W

In reply to by emilianoheyns

Not sure what you mean about dragging beams onto notes - that's not a thing. What beam were you trying to drag, and what were you expecting it to accomplish?

If you attach your actual score rather than a picture, we can understand and assist better. But FWIW, the example shown can be very easily entered just by using the standard keyboard shortcuts or mouse-based procedures described in the Handbook under "Drum notation". The stem directions and voices take care of themselves with no extra steps required.

The only thing you would need to customize is the beaming in twos, since the default in 4/4 is to beam in fours to show the major measure division. If you wish your 4/4 to be beamed in twos, customize the beaming in Time Signature Properties (see the Handbook under beams or time signatures for more info).

In the past, note-writing software had several kinds of note-layout options.
One of them was measure-based, one was tempo-based (nominator, denominator), and the other was equal-spacing (like monopaced fonts).

If the smallest value you use is eigth, the one of them would look very nice.

However, those who write more complicated works have seen that these settings do not give a good result.
But later they looked at dynamic spacing better, and all the software turned to it.

Now, in general, dynamic spacing is used.

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