Tuplets with more than 9 notes

• Feb 16, 2014 - 17:21

Recently I wanted to enter a score that had a tuplet of 17 notes (=to a quarter note). But when I chose a quarter note, and then tried to use "CTRL+17", all I got was a tuplet of 7 notes. Is there a way to enter a tuplet with a two-digit number?

Comments

• Feb 16, 2014 - 21:02

So the original tuplet of 17 was to equal a quarter note. So what I did was to create two tuplets, each to equal an eight note, and made the first one a tuplet of 9 and the second one a tuplet of 8. It sounds fine to me when I play the score.

Originally, when I tried to enter "17" after pressing "N, 5" the "1" was ignored (well naturally, a tuplet of 1 makes no sense!) and so only the "7" was being read, so I got a tuplet of 7. Maybe there is a more elegant solution, but this idea of making two tuplets (9 and 8) seems to work OK.

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• Feb 17, 2014 - 23:10

I didn't realize that your answer was referencing an item in the "Notes" pulldown menu. Usually those are typed something like this: "In the menus - Notes>Tuplets>Other"
so I thought yours was a link to a post or something. When I clicked it, it just went back to your reply. I see now what you were referencing, although I don't know how to set the numbers for a tuplet of 17 notes that will equal a one quarter note (one beat in 4/4 time).

Thanks!

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• Feb 18, 2014 - 01:50

Sorry, people usually accuse me of being too verbose, so I decided to try something different :-)

To use the dialog, I find it works best to first enter a rest of the whole length of the tuplet - a quarter rest in your case. Then, outside note entry mode, select that rest, invoke the dialog, and enter 17 as the first number. For the second number, that's partially up to you. You are specifying what type of note to have the tuplet appear as, by saying how many of this note normally fit in the selected duration. If you enter 2, that is saying to use a note that normally fits 2 in the space of that quarter rest - so they will appear as eighths (single beam). Similarly, 4 makes them appear as sixteenths (two beams), etc. 16 would be the "correct" number to enter here, as tuplets are usually expressed using the next slower rhythmic value. But that's a lot of beams. Sometimes people just say, 3 is enough, and enter "8" here.

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