Well, that actually makes sense!
It is a little weird to have to think like a computer to get things
to work, but it's better than banging keys randomly and howling in
frustration, which seems to be the only alternative... 8-)
Christopher
On Mar 18, 2007, at 11:57 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Mar 18, 2007, at 5:02 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Interesting factoid about Finale I just picked up.
Finale will beam two eighths together, even if there is a grace
note between them.
But it won't beam FOUR by default if you have a grace note between
the second and third, even if you have set Beaming to always beam
four eights together.
Beaming behavior over grace notes is logical and consistent, albeit
neither intuitive nor convenient.
It is not directly related to where the grace note is relative to
the beat. If you've noticed a correlation, I assume it's an
indirect result of how you enter the notes. You must be entering
them in such a way that in one case the note is beamed before you
convert it to a grace note and in the other case it is not.
It's a bit geeky, but here's what's going on:
(1) Every note, regular or grace, has a "beam/beat" status. If that
status is OFF, Finale will attempt to beam that note to the
previous note. If the status is ON, it won't. (This is the
reverse of how we usually think it. We tend to imagine that we're
turning beaming ON, but technically we're turning breaking-the-beam
OFF.)
(2) When a note attempts to beam to the prior note, it succeeds
only if both notes actually do have a flag. Also both notes must
be the same size, ie, a grace note won't beam to a big note.
(3) If a big note tries to beam to the prior note but the prior
note is a grace note, it will continue its attempt back to the next
previous big note, but ONLY if all the intervening grace notes have
beam/beat OFF.
The various beaming options are only directions to Finale on how to
set the beam/beat status as notes are entered and any time you
rebeam the music. The actual beaming behavior of the notes depends
on those statuses, which you can manipulate directly.
When you type "/" in Speedy, what you're doing is toggling the beam/
beat status of the selected note. If the note is in a position
where it can be beamed, you can see it changing back and forth. If
it is not, then you can't see the results, but you're toggling it
nonetheless. If you're playing with multiple notes which, alone,
don't have immediately visible results, you can get confused trying
to keep track of what you're doing. This confusion is the cause of
cases where beaming seems to be illogical and inconsistent, even
though it really isn't.
To make notes beam over grace notes, then, what you need to do is
have beam/beat OFF for the big note following the graces AND all
the intervening graces. That's what you're doing in the example you
described, but since you don't see the result until all of them are
properly set, it can be confusing. (If you get desperate you can
view the beam/beat status directly, in the Edit Frames window.)
Note that a consequence of rule #3 above is the problem Owain
described -- there is no way to set it so that big notes will beam
over multiple grace notes where the grace notes are flagged and
unbeamed. (It would be better if Finale changed the logic so that a
big note could always beam over graces no matter what the graces'
beam/beat status. In that case, you'd be able to achieve any
permutation of beaming by manipulating the appropriate notes. But
I really doubt this fix will be a priority for MakeMusic....)
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