How to manually adjust beam length
I want a C-F chord to have two stems (in measure 18). So I made the chord in two different voicings and then made the noteheads from the first voicing invisible. Usually the stem of the notes in the first voice notes would just move to make a two stem chord once I made the voice invisible. But it didn't (possibly a bug?), so I moved the stem of the first voicing to the chord and I now want to make the beam longer so that it can attach to the stem. Hopefully by looking at the pictures attached you can make sense out of my writing. Is there a better way of moving these note stems or making two stems on this chord somehow? Thanks in advance.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Sonata_no.3_in_Eb_Major.mscz | 30.41 KB |
| Capture.PNG | 7.69 KB |
Comments
I managed to fix it. I just spent ages mucking around with deleting and making notes invisible and I got it to work (somehow).
It seems the automatic merging of unisons in multiple voices only works if the whole chord is duplicated. In your case, your had a C & F in voice 2 but only the C in voice 1. So the simpler solution here would be to just add an F in voice 1 as well. Then with those heads invisible, they would merge. And this would be a better looking result than the broken beam.
To answer the basic question you pose in the thread title: you don't. Beams extend from the stem of the first note to the stem of the last, there is no way to have it otherwise. But you can of course hide notes, stems, etc to create the illusion of a broken beam effect if you really want. Here, though, I think you're better off without it.