Help with a pick-up bar
Hello. As noticed in some of my other posts I am not very knowledgeable yet so could do with some help. :)
I am trying to notate a piece in 6/8. The first note of the melody, which is a semi-quaver when considered in 6/8, starts just BEFORE the first beat, if you see what I mean. (Hope I've said that right. I am not very good at understanding bars or note lengths).
Because my first note starts just before the beat I am trying to do as advised by Marc Sabatella in one of my other threads. To avoid writing the first bar with a rest, (which I'm told would be a confusing and invalid way of notating it), I've tried to do it the proper way, and insert a pick-up bar instead.
The only problem is that my pick-up note has a value of a semi-quaver, but the settings of measure properties only seem to allow me to reduce a measure to a maximum of 1 actual beat per 8. I can't seem to reduce a beat to a half-beat.
Therefore, because my starting note is a semi-quaver and not a quaver, my pick-up bar still starts with a rest.
I don't want it to start with a rest. That's the whole point. I want it to only have a note in it. Currently it consists of a semi-quaver rest and a semi-quaver note. It seems the only way to "fix" it would be to lengthen my first note - but I cannot do that. It would alter the whole melody.
*Confused*
Is there another way of doing this? Please can somebody tell me what to do?
Thank you
Comments
Oh I think I may see the problem. I think the problem is that my melody needs to be notated in 3/4, not 6/8.
I will try it that way and see if it works.
In reply to Oh I think I may see the by Resopmoc
a pickup bar with the time signature of 1/16. A semi-quaver is a 1/16th note in the other way of talking about them.
You need to set your pickup bar (anacrusis) to 1/16
This can be done from the Create Score dialogue.
COme back here if you need further help
HTH
Michael
Setting the pick up to 1/16 should work. But also, you cam set it to 1/8, enter the rest and now, then hide the reat. I do this pretty regularly, like if the pickup is eighth notes (quavers) in 4/4. Somehow, It doesnt seem right to set the pickup to be 3/8 if the time signature is 4/4. So I set it to 2/4 and hide the initial rest.
In reply to Setting the pick up to 1/16 by Marc Sabatella
Why is setting the pickup measure to a longer value than is needed what you regularly do especially when you have to take the steps to hide the rest? The time signature of the pickup isn't visible and if there was a repeat incorporating the fist measure then there would be a hesitation from the hidden rest.
I'm trying to understand all the subtle things that go into writing and engraving music and given your obvious skill I wonder if I'm missing something.
Thanks.
In reply to Marc, can you clarify? by Zoots
It's not really logical, I agree. It' has nothing to do wth how MuseScore works, but is a purely musical reluctance. Somehow, I just resist the idea of having a time signature with a different denominator than the main one unless I really mean it. 3/8 doesn't *really* mean the same thing, musically speaking, as a beat and a half of 4/4 time. Beaming rules differ, accent patterns differ, and one wouldn't normally even assume the eighth note stays constant - really, a measure of 3/8 in the middle of a 4/4 passage might just as likely just indicate that the dotted quarter now takes the beat, so three eighthsnmight be heard as a triplet adding up to one beats, not as a beat and a half. So I just know in my heart that a pickup measure containing a beat and a half is *not* a measure of 3/8, musically speaking.
MuseScore, though, doesn't recognize different beaming rules for 3/8 versus 4/4, nor does it play them back any differently in terms of accent patters or tempo. So it's really all the same as far as MuseScore is concerned. It just bugs me to lie like that, even though I tell other musical lies to get the notation effect I want in other contexts.