Cross staff beaming and grace notes |
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Cross staff beaming [Professional] [Notation] [Keyboard] When you write piano scores, it is common to use the two
staves (bass and treble clef) to write the playing of a musical
phrase. On a more technical level, it means that the same
rhythmic voice (which is up to now entirely on one staff) can be
split into two staves. Here are examples: In these measures, the fact of using the two staves
facilitates the reading of the notes in the two clefs. The lower
notes would not have been easily readable in the treble clef
staff. But these measures only contain one rhythmic voice in the
way Pizzicato defines it. The principle you must understand to write this type of
measure with Pizzicato is that the notes always belong to one of
the two staves. Here we have chosen the upper staff for the
notes, but you could have chosen the lower staff. It is better to
select the staff containing most of the notes as the main one. Once the note is written in a staff, it is easy to drag it
into the other staff, but this dragging is only graphic: the note
continues to belong to its original staff. This implies that the
justification of the rhythmic voice remains related to the
content of the original measure. Let us see how to write these
two measures. Remember that to beam the fifth 16th note to the four
others, you can use the CTRL key when placing it. This principle can be applied in a similar way to move notes
to the upper staff. The SHIFT key used when moving a note forces
it to go through the limit of the two staves and to draw itself
in the other staff, while still belonging to its origin staff. It is a characteristic of a note to be drawn on its origin
staff, on the upper staff or on the lower staff. You can directly
modify this characteristic with a right click on the note. A
contextual menu appears and let you select the Edit note
play menu, opening the following dialog box: The lower frame, entitled Draw the note on, lets you
view or modify this note characteristic. For an explanation of
the other elements of this dialog box, see the lesson about the contextual menu of a note. Notice that it is not necessary to beam the notes before
dragging them to another staff. However, if you don't beam them,
be aware of what you are doing because when you drag a quarter
note or a half note from one staff to another, nothing shows that
these notes belong to their original measure. They should not be
confused with notes belonging to the other staff, otherwise the
behavior of the rhythmic voices could seem illogical. Grace notes [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Keyboard] [Soloist] This is a specific tool to add and manage grace notes. Since
the first version of Pizzicato, the symbols palette contain some
basic simple grace notes and played as grace notes, but their
handling is complex and they do not provide multiple grace notes.
To improve this, Pizzicato 3 introduces an additional
characteristic of a note: the fact of being able to consider a
note as a normal note or as a grace note. The fact that a note can be seen as a grace note implies two
things. First, its rhythmic duration should not be taken into
account in the counting of rhythmic voice beats. In other words
if you add 4 quarter notes in a 4 beats measure, it must be
possible to introduce an eighth grace note on each one of these
quarter notes. The value of these 4 eighth notes should not be
taken into account, otherwise we would have a 6 beats total (4
quarter notes+ 4 eighth notes) in the measure. Second, the grace
note must be a reduced size note and be justified (aligned) to
the main note to which it belongs and be played as a grace note.
The MIDI behavior differs from the other notes. Pizzicato 3
manages all this. Let us see how to add and modify grace notes. The frame entitled Grace note lets you modify the
characteristics of the note: To encode other types of grace notes (containing more than 4
notes), you can first encode all grace notes as normal notes (by
possibly switching off the automatic justification so that
Pizzicato accepts all the notes) and then call the above dialog
box for these notes by checking the grace note check box
and validating. Beam them together and adjust them as needed and
place the main note right after them; switch on the automatic
justification and click a note to force the justification of the
measure. Notice that you can create a reduced note with the note head tool, but
this does not make it a grace note with the characteristics
explained here.