Creating Upbeat Measures |
An upbeat measure begins a section of a song with fewer beats than the full count of beats in the meter. This topic describes how to create an upbeat measure if the barlines in your song are already correctly aligned with the downbeat of measures. If you have imported a MIDI file, or recorded MIDI, such that the barlines are misaligned with the downbeat of measures, then you can shift the barlines, as described in the separate topic, Shifting Barlines. If a section of a song begins with an upbeat measure, and that section has repeats, then the section normally ends with a partial measure. The total number of beats in the upbeat measure and the last measure of the section equals the total number of beats in the meter of the section. The procedure in this topic shows how you can create an upbeat measure, and corresponding last measure of the section, with repeat marks. In the example, we will start with the following score:
We will change the first measure to an upbeat measure; split the third measure to create the section's last measure, which complements the first measure; and add repeat marks.
If you need only to create an upbeat measure, you need only follow the first few steps in the following procedure. To create an upbeat measure and a corresponding trailer measure with repeat marks:
The mouse cursor will turn into this shape:
Composer will display the Change Meter dialog, as shown here:
The result of this step is:
NOTE: Do not attempt to hide the meters in both measures with one visit to the Change Meter dialog, because that will incorrectly make the meter for both measures the same.
The result of this step completes the overall task:
|