Professional

Notation

Composition Light

Composition Pro

Drums and Percussion

Guitar

Keyboard

Soloist

Cross staff beaming and grace notes

Subjects covered:

• Cross staff beaming
• Grace notes

Watch also the following video:

• Introduction of notes and rests (2) (07'51) - Flash - Quicktime

Cross staff beaming [Professional] [Notation] [Keyboard]

When you write piano scores, it is common to use the two staves (bass and treble clef) to write the playing of a musical phrase. On a more technical level, it means that the same rhythmic voice (which is up to now entirely on one staff) can be split into two staves. Here are examples:

In these measures, the fact of using the two staves facilitates the reading of the notes in the two clefs. The lower notes would not have been easily readable in the treble clef staff. But these measures only contain one rhythmic voice in the way Pizzicato defines it.

The principle you must understand to write this type of measure with Pizzicato is that the notes always belong to one of the two staves. Here we have chosen the upper staff for the notes, but you could have chosen the lower staff. It is better to select the staff containing most of the notes as the main one.

Once the note is written in a staff, it is easy to drag it into the other staff, but this dragging is only graphic: the note continues to belong to its original staff. This implies that the justification of the rhythmic voice remains related to the content of the original measure. Let us see how to write these two measures.

• With the tools previously explained, encode the following measure :

Remember that to beam the fifth 16th note to the four others, you can use the CTRL key when placing it.

• While holding down the SHIFT key (used to get the uppercase letters and upper symbols of the keyboard), click the last note and drag it to the correct height into the lower staff. Then release the mouse. When you cross the limit between the staves, Pizzicato draws the ledger lines attached to the lower staff. The result is:

• To add the three other 16th notes, we will drag them into the lower staff while we add them. To do this, add the note in the upper staff but without releasing the mouse (and especially without the SHIFT key, because this key places a rest instead of a note). Then drag the note downwards by holding down the SHIFT key to allow the transfer to the other staff. Release the mouse button only when the note is at the correct position. Slightly adjust the angle of the beams connecting the 8 notes and you get:

• To create the following chord on the two staves, first place the notes on the upper staff. The positions of the notes to be dragged are not important at this step: place as many notes as necessary, you will drag them to the bottom of the staff. Add for instance the following chord:

• Drag the two lowest notes while holding down the SHIFT key. The first measure is finished.

• To write the second measure, add the following measure with the tools already explained:

• Drag the four low notes (C) into the lower staff, by using the SHIFT key. You get:

• Reverse the stem of the first chord (to do this, place the cursor arrow on the D note of the first chord and use the shortcut "i"). You get:

• By adjusting the beam position of the last note, you get the expected result.

This principle can be applied in a similar way to move notes to the upper staff. The SHIFT key used when moving a note forces it to go through the limit of the two staves and to draw itself in the other staff, while still belonging to its origin staff.

It is a characteristic of a note to be drawn on its origin staff, on the upper staff or on the lower staff. You can directly modify this characteristic with a right click on the note. A contextual menu appears and let you select the Edit note play menu, opening the following dialog box:

The lower frame, entitled Draw the note on, lets you view or modify this note characteristic. For an explanation of the other elements of this dialog box, see the lesson about the contextual menu of a note.

Notice that it is not necessary to beam the notes before dragging them to another staff. However, if you don't beam them, be aware of what you are doing because when you drag a quarter note or a half note from one staff to another, nothing shows that these notes belong to their original measure. They should not be confused with notes belonging to the other staff, otherwise the behavior of the rhythmic voices could seem illogical.

Grace notes [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Keyboard] [Soloist]

This is a specific tool to add and manage grace notes. Since the first version of Pizzicato, the symbols palette contain some basic simple grace notes and played as grace notes, but their handling is complex and they do not provide multiple grace notes. To improve this, Pizzicato 3 introduces an additional characteristic of a note: the fact of being able to consider a note as a normal note or as a grace note.

The fact that a note can be seen as a grace note implies two things. First, its rhythmic duration should not be taken into account in the counting of rhythmic voice beats. In other words if you add 4 quarter notes in a 4 beats measure, it must be possible to introduce an eighth grace note on each one of these quarter notes. The value of these 4 eighth notes should not be taken into account, otherwise we would have a 6 beats total (4 quarter notes+ 4 eighth notes) in the measure. Second, the grace note must be a reduced size note and be justified (aligned) to the main note to which it belongs and be played as a grace note. The MIDI behavior differs from the other notes. Pizzicato 3 manages all this. Let us see how to add and modify grace notes.

• In a new document, fill in the score to have the following (use the screen zoom to encode more precisely):

• Click the first note with the right mouse button and select the Add a grace note...Single item. The grace note appears in front of the main note :

• Except for the fact that this note is a grace note, it behaves as a normal note. You can move it to change its pitch, add an accidental, a symbol... Add now a double grace note on the second note, reverse the stems and adjust the notes and the beaming to get:

• In a similar way, add a quadruple grace note and adjust it to get for instance:

• Listen to the sound result. By default, the playing of grace notes starts at the main note normal start time and its duration is subtracted from the main note which then becomes shorter. Click on the first grace note (G) with the right mouse button and select the Edit note play... item. The following dialog box appears:

The frame entitled Grace note lets you modify the characteristics of the note:

• A check box is used to have a slashed grace note
• A check box forces the play of the grace note before the main note. This option can be used everywhere except in the first beat of the first measure to play, because Pizzicato can not go backward in time before the beginning of the play. In this precise case, the play would be executed as if this option was not checked.
• The duration can be determined by a text box. This number determines the duration of the grace note, in units. A quarter note contains 480 units in Pizzicato. The default value of 60 corresponds to a 32nd note.
• The Apply to group check box lets you apply these modifications to all grace notes of the group (if there is more than one grace note)

• Check the Slashed check box and click on OK. The measure becomes:

To encode other types of grace notes (containing more than 4 notes), you can first encode all grace notes as normal notes (by possibly switching off the automatic justification so that Pizzicato accepts all the notes) and then call the above dialog box for these notes by checking the grace note check box and validating. Beam them together and adjust them as needed and place the main note right after them; switch on the automatic justification and click a note to force the justification of the measure.

Notice that you can create a reduced note with the note head tool, but this does not make it a grace note with the characteristics explained here.