Eighth Note Beams
I've been doing a lot of notation for a friend recently. His handwritten scores use eighth notes beamed together in groups of 2 in simple meters. Musescore wants to beam eighth notes in groups of 4 or 6, depending on the meter.
What is the most common way to beam eighth notes?
Comments
I can't say what is the most common way to beam eighth notes but to beam them in groups of 2:
right click on the Time Signature and then amend the beaming shown, ie clicking on the third eighth note will break the beam at that point, same for the fifth note and so on.
In "Behind Bars", Elaine Gould says
" in 2/4 and 3/4, any number of quavers can be beamed together"
"in 4/8 and 4/4, groups of semiquavers and quavers respectively may be beamed into half-bars"
MuseScore follows this rule by default.
In reply to In "Behind Bars", Elaine by [DELETED] 5
It is worth noting that many older editions will beam a full measures of eighth notes (quavers) all together even in 4/4. Modern editions, though, especially in genres other than classical, usually break things up into half bars for duple meters (4/4 etc). Breaking into individual beats is not normally done for 4/4 but some editions do this indeed. I don't recommend it - it ac tually hampers readability to deviate from the norm, plus it obscures the middle of the measure a bit.
For 3/4, while it is true that "anything goes" to some extent, in my experience most editions will try to expose *either* beat two &or* beat three. So the beaming would be 1+2 or 2+1, depedning on which ends up being simpler.
In reply to It is worth noting that many by Marc Sabatella
No beaming is frequently done for choral music, beams instead of (or in addition to) slurs, for melismas, no beams for individual syllables
For piano/vocal arrangements for many musicals the 4/4 measure gets the quavers beamed into groups of 4. When there is a quaver rest followed by 7 quavers then many such scores are written as [rest], quaver, 2 quavers, 4 quavers. MuseScore defaults to [rest], 3, 4 but it's easy to beam and unbeam if you set up shortcut keys (I have \ for Beam_Middle and [Shift] \ for Beam_Start, for instance - nice and handy down on the bottom left of my keyboard). It seems the older scores go more for splitting quavers whilst the newer ones are more for beaming everything but there is no hard and fast rule.