Strange beams

• May 19, 2015 - 17:38

Hi

I am having difficulties in organising the beams as I want them in an arrangement of Anitra's Dance from Grieg'sPeer Gynt. I am using version 2.0.1 and Windows 8.

The piece is in '3/4' time and the original beaming for quavers is in pairs viz.
original beams.JPG
However, because of the syncopation in these bars I wish to beam all 6 quavers together in each bar. I can do this for the first bar. I select the bar and click on "beam middle", the second icon in from the left on the beam pallette.

first step.JPG

So far so good. If I repeat the action for the second bar I get both bars beamed together, viz

second step.JPG

which is wrong. If I select all the relevant bars and click on "beam middle" I get all 4 bars beamed together. viz

even worse beaming.JPG

Whatever I do I don't seem able to beam each bar separately as a group of 6 for these bars. I want to retain the usual pairing of 2 quavers for other parts of the score so don't want to make global changes. I have scoured the handbook and the forums, but so far have not found a solution. I have even tried adding an extra instrument to the score, copying the second bar to that instrument, changing the beaming in that new instrument and copying the new bar back into the original instrument. It doesn't work. I still get the beams across both bars.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Many thanks.


Comments

select the 1st note in 2nd bar, Ctrl+select the 1 note in 3rd bar, Ctrl-select the 1st note in 4th bar, click on the start bar or, probably better, the auto entry in the beams palette

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Am I missing something? I have tried your suggestion but to no avail.

Starting with

original beams.JPG

I then select the the first note in each bar, ie select the first one in bar 1 and the first in each of the following bars using ctrl select, (they turn blue) but then selecting "auto entry" does nothing to change the beams.
If, having selected the first note of each bar I click on "beam middle" I get

next attempt.JPG

which is still not right.

Oh dear!! Back to the head scratching.

In reply to by schepers

Bingo!!!!

Thank you very much. It worked (why isn't this documented somewhere.......?)

Having made it work I then experimented further. You can either select the 3rd note and then ctrl select the 5th (to get 2 blue highlighted notes) or you can select the 3rd and then shift select the fifth to get

another try.JPG

and then select "beam middle". I applied this to each of the bars and finally achieved the result

and finally.JPG

Thanks for your help.

Beaming is document in the Handbook here: https://musescore.org/en/node/36046. i think if you read the description and think it through, you will understand why selecting the entire bar and setting to "Beam middle" does not work: you are literally saying would want each note - include the first - to be the middle of a beam. Selecting all but the first note of the measure and then setting to "Beam middle" *does* work. Or, select the whole range, setting to "Beam middle", then go in and select just the first note of each measure and reset to "Auto".

If you want this through the piece, it is easier to set the defaults properties for the time signature - right click it, Time Signature Properties, and use the provided controls to set the beaming defaults. But if you prefer to have the eighths individually beamed in most places - just not here - then doing as described here is indeed the way to go.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thank you Marc

Yes. It does make more sense, but only after a lot of headscratching first. However, now I know how to do it......

I agree that it is better to set default properties if this is wanted throughout the piece, but in this case I needed it in just some bars.

Once again thanks to those who contributed to the discussion. I can now tick off another bit of understanding MuseScore.

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