Strange question for you, Nick, but I'm curious. Why do you refer to a single line percussion staff as a leger line? I've always understood a leger line to be a short line above or below a staff, not one of the staff lines proper.
Oh dear! Thanks, David, for pointing this out and for your diplomacy. Yes, I just meant by leger line a horizontal full staff line and had got confused.
The fact that the single leger line doesn't come right to the bottom of the bracket is, I agree, not a serious problem but it is an irritation and the way the barlines cut through the line is an eyesore.
Hi,
An eyesore to me they may be, but the bar lines cutting through the leger line seems standard, as Carl suggested. Sorry. However the book always uses orchestral staves, (added later) and the single leger line is always raised significantly from the bottom of the thick black line of the staff in NWC, whereas it is always flush with the bottom in the book.
Percussion parts in score are usually standard, not orchestral. NWC handles this correctly..
Hi Carl,
I'm not qualified to comment on this; except that I am copying what exists in the scholarly tome I'm using.
The example I'm doing just now is for vocal line and drum only; so just two staves and I need the barlines to be continuous through both. The fact that the single leger line doesn't come right to the bottom of the bracket is, I agree, not a serious problem but it is an irritation and the way the barlines cut through the line is an eyesore.
I hoped that there was a ruse I'd missed to deal with this or an easy workaround might be possible. It seems not.
There is another example I've done where there are three staves and I've been able to put the percussive effect, the clacking of a goat-mask's jaws!, on a single line in the middle orchestral staff, which is fine.
I have reduced a lower orchestral staff to one leger line, for a drum accompaniment. Unfortunately the line ends up slightly higher than the bottom of the bracket. Is there a way round this? Thanks.
I hit another little difficulty, probably rather obvious but which had me perplexed for a while.
In another folk song there is a drum accompaniment. I used two orchestral staves, vocal (with lyric) and drum, and put the drum on the lower with a single leger line. Thanks to Rick G.'s post in 'new barline type?' I could use dotted bar lines across the staves where needed.
All went well until a rather long underline in the top staff passed through the dotted bar line. As I had put my central 'text' underline immediately after the dotted barline, this put the dotted bar lines in their respective staves out of sync. However, if the central 'text' underline is put before the dotted bar line there is no such problem.
Yes, the text entry route is easy. At first I thought it would be ok with just one entry left justified at the first note of the word/syllable to be underlined and then the underscores extended the required length. It looked fine in the main window but luckily I had a peak at the print preview and realised why David included the middle and final note text entries.
However, it seems the text entry for the last note of the word is better when it is left justified. I can't get it to work as well when it is right justified.
There are also three slight glitches. The notes are pushed away a little from whatever precedes them; adjustment of the length of the underline is not very sensitive as can be seen in the attached file with the two endings of 'Lerloi', both of which have the same code, (presumably something to do with the semi-quavers in bar 1,) and by comparing the two 'tu's; and actually the underline for 'tu' should only be for the 'u' part of the syllable.
I've attached a very short folk song with its underlines (NWC2 file). The staff lower limit is 21 and the vocal line is offset 7 to show the underlines clearly. The text entry staff position is -12 and QWERTY underscores were used.
PS. Changed the file as prev. attachment had Romanian font! Sorry.
Yes, it was Bartok that first got me interested in Romanian folk music and then I came across Maria Lataretu, etc. and the urban blues of Romica Puceanu, etc.
Unfortunately, in this particular case I'm transcribing extracts from Romanian folk songs and need to use a Romanian font.
So it has to be layering; although as far as I can see there is no way I can underline a whole word spread over a number of notes. The best I can do is to underline each syllable and put up with a space where the 'breaking' hyphens/spaces go. I used Alt + 0151 as my underline and adjusted the lower vertical size of the 'underline' staff in the lyric editor configuration so that the underline is at about the right depth when the two staves are layered.
I thought at first it was going to be really hard to get the underlines in the 'underline' layer in exactly the right places with empty gaps of just the right distance for the long stretches of lyric that did not need underlines. But with a bit of practice I have found I can do it quite easily using search and replace. I copied the whole original vocal line into my word editor and using 'replace' changed the 'breaking' hyphens into spaces; otherwise, of course, one gets two sets of hyphens at slightly different levels in the layered staves. Then I changed any real Alt + 0151 dashes into underscores. Then I substituted Alt + 0151 for whichever character/s I needed to underline. Then using wildcards for all letters and punctuation marks, etc. I replaced all of them with underscores. Of course, 'underscore shown as space' is checked in the lyric editor configuration. I left any existing white space as white space.
And having pasted the result into the vocal line of the 'underline' layer and layered the two staves together I have a fairly satisfactory solution.
I need to underline a few of the words and characters in a vocal line.
I tried selecting the word in the lyrics editor and pressing Ctrl + u to no avail. I thought of adding a second lyric line with Alt + 0151 's under the to-be-underlined words and otherwise spaces but it didn't look that good and was going to be very time consuming as the underlined words and characters are dotted about in various places.
There is probably a simple answer to this and I'd be very grateful for any help. Thanks.
Sorry, with ordinary notes, yes. I was stupidly still thinking of grace notes whose slurs, like beams, can't. Doing away with a bar line in a layered stave sounds interesting. Has a lion tamer posted an example and method?
In NWC2, I have used a pair of beamed headless, stemless grace eighth notes for this
Your method, Rick, will work within a bar but I can't make it work across a bar line. Same for a slur. A tie is ok. But as you say this is an NWC2 topic and, though very helpful, slightly different from this one which is looking for a font with a 45 degree slash of ordinary thickness.
Yes. Using italic with the Opus Chords Alt + 0188 at 48pt. helps. The angle is now even better, almost perfect, and the line is a tiny bit thinner. Acceptable at a pinch. If only the basic design was the normal line weight!
My version of Opus Chords is 4.60 and the copyright is up to 2007. I see it is a Sibelius product. I really can't remember how I got the suite but I seem to have the whole lot, 17 different fonts. I suppose they must have come with Scorch, their free file viewer.
I have tried two entries of Alt + 0188 with the Opus Chords font at 16pt, one before and one after the bar line and got them to make a continuous line. But it starts a bit after the first notehead and finishes a bit before the second notehead. And the angle has become too steep again.
I tried three entries but the juggling was beyond me, I couldn't get them to make a continuous line and, even if I had, it didn't look as if the angle would have been right.
I tried using the italic Symbol slash at 48 pt. and the line thickness was fine but the angle was still quite a bit too steep. Hmm!
After further thought, (I'm not a pianist!) perhaps the purpose of this diagonal line is to show that the string of notes started in the left hand should be continued in the right hand afterwards. Is there a special name for such a line?
While entering the piano part in an accompanied song I have come across what I think is a glissando, reaching from the last note of the bar (a D above middle C) in the bass clef to the first note of the next bar (an E above m C) in the treble clef. It is a straight diagonal line of the usual thickness as slurs, etc..
I've looked at the ways suggested of entering this. I can do it using text at the beginning of the second bar with right justification and a staff position of 11. BUT, due to its longer stretch over the bar line, the angle of the needed line is at a minimum of 45 degrees and all the slash lines I've found so far that might be used for the purpose run at about 30 degrees to the vertical, i.e. at too sharp an incline. I have found one in Opus Chords.ttf (Alt + 0188) that runs at just about the right angle but unfortunately it is a relatively thick slash and at 36 pt, which I need for the length, is rather too thick. Does anyone know of a font with a similarly angled forward slash of normal line thickness? Or a better way of achieving what I'm after? Thanks for your help.
Hi, I am creating a chord which consists of a whole note with a downward stem and a dotted quarter note with an upward stem, both on the same note. Somehow the whole note gets placed between the quarternote and its dot, which makes it difficult to notice the dot when reading the music. If the whole note was placed before the quarter note the problem would disappear; but is it possible to force this to happen? Or is there another solution? Layering doesn't help and nor does the order in which I input each note. Thanks for any help, Nick
