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Topic: Notation across Staves (Read 3807 times) previous topic - next topic

Notation across Staves

I am new to Noteworthy (brilliant piece of Software) and seek assistance. I am notating a piece of music that runs across the bass and treble clef - it is for harp or piano and in the piece of music I have, the 2 staves are treated as one ie left hand running to right hand. I cannot seem to duplicate this in Noteworthy. I don't care about the midi aspects only the printed part. I can do a 'fix' by inserting rests and hiding but then cannot beam the semiquavers or slur across the staves.

Does anyone have a solution or is it not possible?

Cheers

Janene

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #1 –
Janene,

Interesting problem. I tried creating two staffs, bass and treble with top and bottom spacing such that the middle C's coincided. That way you could stay in (say) the bottom staff and place notes that would actually appear in the top staff. Unfortunately it appears the minimum spacing at top and bottom is 8, so the staves don't get close enough.

Now, if you *REALLY* don't care about MIDI playback, you might make do with something along these lines, just for the cross over parts, placing the notes in whichever stave you're running from, but at a position so they display in the other staff. You'll need to white out the ledger lines. For example, I have treble and bass with spacing of 8. A run of 4 quavers from A in the bass up to D in the treble. If I enter the notes as A, B, G, A in the bass clef, the G and A appear to be C and D in the treble clef. I can beam and/or slur across the whole group. The only visual problem is the extra ledger lines and the discontiguous spacing.

Noteworthy support - I'm sure there's a really good reason for not allowing the top and bottom spacing down to 6, but if that were possible the Cs would coincide and these runs would be feasible.

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #2 –
Each staff, even those combined into a piano grand staff, are actually independent entities when it comes to notes and stuff. Your best bet is to do whatever you can by using hiddden rests in the staff that is not used during the run. So, when the part runs from the bass clef staff into the treble clef staff, just add hidden rests in the bass clef staff to show that the music is flowing from one staff into the other. You will not be able to combine the note beams and slurs, but the absence of notation in the other staff should make the run fairly clear.

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #3 –
I've managed to create a beamed group that 'jumps' from one stave to another by the following method.

I noticed that if you make the last note of a beamed group invisible, the beam does not become invisible but 'hangs' to the right. I also noticed that when the last 2 notes of a beamed group are the same, the beam is always exactly horizontal and the length of the stems of all the notes in the group (and hence the vertical position of the beam) can be adjusted depending on the pitch of those final notes.

In my piece there is an arpeggio-like accompaniment that passes from the left hand to the right. The first 3 notes (quavers, or eighth-notes) are in the left hand. Having written these, I inserted 2 'dummy' notes, beamed the whole lot and made sure the stems were pointing up. The dummy notes were made invisible, so that the beam stuck out to the right. I padded out the rest of the bar with invisible rests in the left hand.

The right-hand part starts at the fourth quaver. I put in 3 invisible rests so the first note would occur at the correct point, and then completed the right-hand part with beamed quavers. As it happened, Noteworthy made the beam in the right hand exactly horizontal too (with stems down).

By adjusting the pitch of the invisible 'dummy' notes in the left hand I could line the left-hand beam up with the right-hand one so they looked like a continuous line. The staves have to be a certain distance apart (say 15 minimum) or you might find you can't get the stems short enough.

The result looks fine in my piece. I don't think it would work in every conceivable situation, because it relies on the beams being horizontal. But it's worth playing round with the possibilities. If you could manually specify the length of note stems you could do almost anything. (It's on my wish list!)

As a final refinement, you can insert a MPC before the invisible 'dummy' notes to make them inaudible as well (and another after them to turn the sound back on).

Incidentally, if you make the *first* note of a beamed group invisible, the stems and beams of all the other notes disappear too, leaving you with disembodied note-heads. So far I haven't found a use for this. Any ideas?

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #4 –
Quite a discovery. This allows one to write something resembling Plainsong Chant - With whole notes indicating long durations and filled in notes shorter. The actual durations are determined by the performer, and the appropriate rhythm determined by the text. Modern Composers like George Crumb have also used 'stemless' notes for similar effect.

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #5 –
I hadn't thought much about the fact that a beamed group with two identically pitched notes ends up with a strictly horizontal beam, but now that you mentioned it, I realize why some of my scores look really, well, cruddy.

Isn't it conceivable that someone - me, for instance, now that my attention has been drawn to it - might report this to Noteworthy Support as a bug, and that Noteworthy Support might even go and fix it?

Should that occur, your cross-staff beaming solution will fail.

Always dangerous to depend upon chance behaviors of software.

- seb

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #6 –
I wouldn't call it a bug exactly. NWC appears to do fine with a finite set of beamed note choices - 3rds, 2nds, a few 3rds and a fourth, for example. If it doesn't fit those known choices, it just makes the beam straight. A solution might be to give the beam 'properties' that the user can modify. Or allow the user to control the 'Beam lookup table', if that's how it's done. There are just too many note combinations, for the program to handle each one to the users' preference.

Re: Notation across Staves

Reply #7 –
I thought the most obvious solution would be to slur the two notes on the one stave. Then continue the notation on the other stave! I'm sure I've done this before... very easy :-)