Different note durations on same staff

[Tim Mariott]

I am trying to put in a worship song score where the vocal line has notes of one duration but the keyboard accompaniment (vocal line + extra chording) includes notes of a (mostly) longer duration. I have been able to put in some of these notes OK using the two different voices but one problem remains.

The vocal line has, for example, a sequence of quarter, eighth and dotted notes, whilst the accompaniment includes a whole note, or sometimes a half-note. But when I enter the whole note, even in a different voice to the vocal line notes, it gets split into a tied sequence of notes matching the vocal line.

This looks very messy compared to the printed score which has a nice single whole note - and I guess my keyboard player will not be delighted.

I cannot easily put the accompaniment notes on to a separate staff as the keyboard still has to play the vocal line as well.

So, any way of forcing Notation NOT to split the whole note?

[Sherry C]

Hi Tim,

You can change the tied notes to "cleaner" notation by (1) clicking on just the tie and (2) clicking the "Collapse ties" button in the tie palette. You can check out this post for a downloadable video on doing that operation en masse (eg. for an entire score at once).

Mark has improved this behavior to not automatically change eg. a dotted quarter note into a quarter note tied to an eighth note for the upcoming 2.6 release, which you'll get free

ttfn,
Sherry

[Tim Mariott]

Sherry

Thanks for usual very rapid reply. Unfortunately your advice is what I was already trying. I have done so again following precisely your steps but I still cannot get it to collapse. I guess there could be something strange in this file as it started life as a MIDI exported by the software I used before Notation. Can you check it out please?

Thanks: Tim

[Sherry C]

Hi Tim,

You have the dubious distinction of having uncovered a bug with the collapse ties command. I'm writing this up for fixing, and will use some snippets from your file as excellent examples where the collapse ties command needs to be more robust.

Unfortunately the bad news is that there is no workaround that I could figure out for some of these (eg. measure 9) without using the Staff/Split Melody and Accompaniment command. Is your keyboard player supposed to play the bass line as well, or would it be ok to split the score like I did? (eg. Use Staff/Split Melody and Accompaniment, and have a total of 3 staves in the piece, with one being what sounds like a "bass player" part.)

Thanks!
Sherry

[Tim Mariott]

Sherry

Glad to be of service. Before I retired, software testing was often part of my job .....

I tried my keyboard player on both versions and she preferred the messy two staves rather than the cleaner three staves.

I will look forward to a fix in due course.

Best wishes - Tim