Dashed slurs/dashed ties

[FABSandler]

Greetings. I am using Finale 2014.5 on a Mac, and working on a choral score. I am familiar with the dashed slur to accommodate text for multiple verses where one verse has two syllables and another only one. My question is, does one use a dashed "tie" if the two pitches in a voice are the same? In this score, the soprano and alto share a staff, and tenor and bass share a staff. The two notes in each voice are beamed 8th notes. Soprano has two F's, Bass has two Bb's, Alto has D-C, and Tenor, Bb to Ab. So if there were only one syllable, I would tie common pitches in Soprano and Bass, and place a slur over the beam in the tenor, and under the beam in the alto. However, there are two syllables in the text of v. 2. I can use a dashed slur for alto and tenor, but would I use a dashed tie for the soprano and bass? If so, would it be connecting the note-heads, or located at the beam.

Thanks so much.

[miker]

Finale only has a dashed slur, not a tie.

Use it, and put it in the same place that a tie would go.

However: it will play back as a slur, not a tie. So, the two notes would both be played.

[Peter Thomsen]

… and, By The Way, Finale v25 has a contoured dashed slur.

Looks better than the dashed curve in previous versions.

[fcopaja]

F25 dashed slurs are great, however, I haven't found how to set how long-short are the white spaces.

Felipe

[zuill]

It is in Smart Shape Options. The settings are on the right side of the box. The settings affect all Smart Shapes with dashes. I don't think there is a way to have it independent from other dashed items, unless you created a custom one with its own settings.

Zuill

[BuonTempi]

I use a dash of 5pt (20 EVPUs) and a gap of 3pt (12 EVPUs). That seems to work well.

[MikeHalloran]

The reasons for a dashed tie would be editorial like in a critical edition or to indicate that some verses are sung one way while others are not.

In any case, a dashed slur works perfectly well since Finale never knows which verses need to be sung one way and which the other.

I'm in the camp that believes dashed ties are never necessary in a performance edition. That the vast majority of the hymnals in my collection never use them is one of the things that reinforces this belief—the other is that I sing in many choirs and find them most distracting. A melisma (Word Extension in Finale) is always preferred.

Dashed slurs as phrase indicators are sometimes nice but, otherwise, save them for critical editions—again, they're distracting and can be confusing (do I slur or don't I?).

There are a few exceptions and always have to do with bowing.