Stems and beam angle
I'm engraving a piece where I got a little surprised on how MuseScore by default set the stem and the beam angle.
In the picture below, I've included the original engraving from Peters and then two examples from MuseScore default. The first one, the cue notes as it is automatically engraved and in the picture to the right after having flipped the stem direction.
The Violin 1 notes are in voice 1 and the cue notes are in voice 2.
The lower left "MS default" is in principle correct showing adequate stem lengths and the expected beam angle.
However, if I flip the stem direction the beams become ridiculously long and the beams are perfectly horizontal. Why are the stems so long and why is the beam angle 0. According to "Behind Bars", this is incorrect as either the beam is attached to the stave-line or an angled beam should be used.
Of course I know that this can be manually tweaked but I'm still wondering why the standard approach is not applied.
NB Peters probably entered the cue notes with the stems upwards to save space between the staves.
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Comments
I'd recommend asking this in Engraving to see what Simon has to say to about it. I could imagine their being good rationales for this (the mere fact that Gould recommends soemthing doesn't make it gospel),
In reply to I'd recommend asking this in… by Marc Sabatella
I agree, but in this case Gould makes reference to Ted Ross who spend many pages defining beam slant angles etc. None of them was perfectly horizontal when the notes had different pitches.
You mean the Engraving subforum. I thought this was only for MS announcing engraving improvement between the various version, but if it is ok, I can , of course, raise the question there.
In reply to I agree, but in this case… by TomStrand
I don't see anything in the forum description saying it is meant ot be limited to announcements, and indeed it specifically mentions "discussions". I think if it were meant to be announcements only, it would be set to not allow users to post, as is the case in the actual Announcements forum. Anhyhow, the suggestion was purely for practical reasons - it's highly unlikely any of the engraving team would see a post buried here, but they'll very likely see posts there in Engraving. Or the Engraving channel on the MuseScore server on Discord. or you could just just open an issue on GitHub to raise it more directly, but this does seem a gray enough area that I think it deserves discussion first.