Finale Forum

Hello friends.

What should I do to change at once this





to







I know that the longest way which is

Speedy Entry Tool → go to measure → Press Slash "/"


but I want to learn how to change at once all notes.

Change your time signature to 8/8 and display it as 4/4.

Utilities Menu > Rebeam > Rebeam to Time Signature. Set the Time Signature to "8/8" and hit OK.

N.

Thank you all for the answers.
Now I can much faster make change when I write song with lyrics for my homework.

Have a nice day.

We have not broken beams for lyrics for about 100 years. Modern practice is to beam according to the time signature. So, please don't do this, unless you intend your works to look like they were written in 1917 instead of 2017.

Two samples: 19th and 20ieth century.

If you want to use the older style, you should only break beams where the syllables break (two notes on one syllable should stay beamed), so the way to do this in Finale is to write it normally with beams with a normal time signature, put in your lyrics, then use Utilities/Rebeam/Rebeam to Lyrics. This will break the beams where appropriate.

By the way, FergusMac, I've got a first edition piano-vocal score of Porgy and Bess (Gershwin Publishing Corp., Chappell & Co, inc., 1935--very cool!) and the notes are separated the old way; your example must be from another edition. I suspect there's considerable temporal overlap of the two styles. I agree with you though, that standard beaming is easier to read, at least for this non-singer.

When I was in school, the old way was still being taught. I recently heard someone 15 years my junior state the "correct" way to notate vocal music. Yikes!

I rejected that idea 45 years ago and still do. Beamed notes are easier to read and I am a singer.

That said, homework implies that an instructor is telling you to do it the old way. Now you know that Finale has tools that let you work quickly and correct it for the instructor—even if we think that he/she is wrong and outdated. No doubt the instructor has been told by others regarding this practice—no need for you to waste time debating it while you are the student.

Good luck!

Do you have any thoughts, Mike, on why the old style originally came to be? I've never really understood it. It shows syllabification, but there are of course other indications of that (slurs or not, alignment of lyrics), and violin beams were never broken to show bowing as far as I know!

I often work with 17th and 18th century sources, and from that experience I would say that it is a practical/technical choice. The lyrics are never, I repeat, never aligned with the right notes, so the only way to decide on where to put the lyrics is with guidance of the beaming. Also, when working with italian language, the difference of making a elision of two syllables on two (slurred) notes or splitting them up on one note each, is expressed with beaming.

It is an interesting subject. Maybe the practice goes back to gregorian chant, but that's only a guess.

In recits, I have found that it is more "easy" for the singers I have worked with to get to a good declamation, if the notes are not beamed together showing the beats (away from the tyranny of squarish notation!).

So, IMO, this way of notating definitely has its place. Not in all music, and possibly not at all in today's music.

Harpsi wrote:… …In recits, I have found that it is more "easy" for the singers I have worked with to get to a good declamation, if the notes are not beamed together showing the beats (away from the tyranny of squarish notation!).

So, IMO, this way of notating definitely has its place. Not in all music, and possibly not at all in today's music.

I use it for free recitative (but not otherwise) in my own music.

David Ward wrote:

Harpsi wrote:… …In recits, I have found that it is more "easy" for the singers I have worked with to get to a good declamation, if the notes are not beamed together showing the beats (away from the tyranny of squarish notation!).

So, IMO, this way of notating definitely has its place. Not in all music, and possibly not at all in today's music.

I use it for free recitative (but not otherwise) in my own music.

I like it with recitative.

motet wrote:Do you have any thoughts, Mike, on why the old style originally came to be? I've never really understood it. It shows syllabification, but there are of course other indications of that (slurs or not, alignment of lyrics), and violin beams were never broken to show bowing as far as I know!

Good question! I've never heard a satisfactory answer.

Plainsong/chant has its own forms of beaming within words and syllables so that can't be it.

I wonder if it has to do with old styles of engraving. Were single notes with lyrics easier to engrave on copper? Remember that this is done backwards. Could it be something that practical?

That's an issue for all music, though. Maybe it's as Harpsi says, difficulty in lining up lyrics in the old days.

The Stravinsky scores I looked at all had unbeamed notes in the vocal parts as well.

http://www.sibeliusblog.com/tips/tradit ... -melismas/

http://forums.cpdl.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=5375

Gould "Behind Bars" page 425: "Until well into the twentieth century, a separate tail was used for each syllable in vocal music, and notes within a beat were beamed only to indicate that a syllable took more than one note. In syllabic setting, this notation makes all but the simplest rhythms difficult to read, a problem compounded by the fact that text underlay often distorts note-spacing....Instrumental beaming...is now used in vocal music together with syllabic slurs."

[quote="FergusMac"
Gould "Behind Bars" page 425: "Until well into the twentieth century, ..."[/quote]

Yep, says it in my copy, too.

Apparently, the instructor for the OP hasn't read Gould nor gotten past "…well into the twentieth century…".

Hmmm... it's an expensive book but a lot of textbooks are. The hard cover is $66.99 and the Kindle edition is $35.99.
https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Bars-Defi ... 0571514561

I think that it should be required for music students at the college or conservatory level, nowadays but, as I suggested in an earlier post, the OP should not make an issue of it. Damn, in many ways, I am glad that the internet wasn't available when I was in college (notation software, PCs and the like would have been nice!).

Come to think of it, I remember paying nearly $20 for Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration—every music major was required to own it for Musicianship 1A. Now I see a Dover Edition for $13 forty-five years later and a Kindle Edition for free (the free version does not display the musical examples, however)!
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i ... VDXM9V8SBT

My copy of Forsyth's "Orchestration" was $8.10 in 1962.

FergusMac wrote:My copy of Forsyth's "Orchestration" was $8.10 in 1962.

There's a Dover edition of that, too, and like the Rimsky, plenty of places to download it for free.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C8UR0DA/re ... TF8&btkr=1

If schools are still teaching from those, no wonder...

We used the Kent Kennan book.

Zuill

Kennan was the first orchestration book I owned and I learned a lot from it. I've collected a bunch of others over the years mainly for fun browsing. They seem to be getting fatter and fatter. Newer ones do have more information about some things, for example percussion, and more examples from the literature.