What to do when notes dont fit in a measure?

In the above image i am trying to fit a pattern into a 4/4 staff. You can see its all broken between the measures and Finale doesn't connect the quarter note with the eight notes in some places. What should i do? Change time signature? Or is this correct?

Thanks a lot!

If it is a polyrythm, it is correct. But is there anyway to override the automatic beaming in Finale? There should be. If you wish to make the polyrythm more obvious then it would be better to beam them together, and across bars, makes it more obvious.

If it isn't a polyrythm, just write it in 6/8 or something.

If it is a polyrythm, it is correct. But is there anyway to override the automatic beaming in Finale? There should be. If you wish to make the polyrythm more obvious then it would be better to beam them together, and across bars, makes it more obvious.

If it isn't a polyrythm, just write it in 6/8 or something.

What do you mean by polyrythm?

And can i beam notes across bars???

If this is the way music is written, than i will just beam the notes together as you suggested.

this is not polyrythm, just go for 6/8.

this is not polyrythm, just go for 6/8.

Polyrhythm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Omg i cant even start writing music. I only come up with crazy designs! Look at the above image. Is it performable? Could someone teach me how not to cross every measure with ties? When I try to put the notes with the exact length i want them to have I end up with totally unreadable music. I just hear the note and then go like "hmm i will add a dot to it, its too short".

Showing 2 bars doesn't help really. This is a small motif. It depends on the other instruments (if any) the rest of the phrase, the pulse, all those things. I bet I could come up with something like the 2nd example you've shown us and still have the rest of the score normal...

Try to be more precise and more concise in what you want and what you're after really. :)

On the 2nd example what looks weird is the doted 16ths. It looks really weird, you break the 3rd beat and don't have it present and other things. It is a matter of tempo probably to make the dottred 16ths seem like normal 16ths, which would resolve pretty much everything. Do the math and it should be fine. :)

BTW: in finale you cannot really bypass the automatic beaming (I mean you can beam however you like, but not accross bars), but you can extend the beams from one bar to the next and make them meet. But it's not the best practice. IT always depends on what's going on above and bellow...

Showing 2 bars doesn't help really. This is a small motif. It depends on the other instruments (if any) the rest of the phrase, the pulse, all those things. I bet I could come up with something like the 2nd example you've shown us and still have the rest of the score normal...

Thats my problem! How do you keep the score normal? Do you restrain yourself from using note lengths that will mar the beats? I just play the music and keep adding dots everywhere ehehehhehe

On the 2nd example what looks weird is the doted 16ths. It looks really weird, you break the 3rd beat and don't have it present and other things. It is a matter of tempo probably to make the dotted 16ths seem like normal 16ths, which would resolve pretty much everything. Do the math and it should be fine. :)

Do you mean that if i adjust the tempo i could remove the dots from the 16ths?

Sorry nikolas, I am just a beginner :)

I don't have much time but this is a rough explanation without a score:

1 dotted 16th = 3/32s right?

3/32s take some definate time to be played. Depending on tempo. If the tempo is allegro, for example (120 bmp) then this would be very very fast. A fragmenet of a sec. If it was Grave (40 bmp) then it would be around a sec or so...

Now if you know how much time it takes to play those 3/32nds then you can make a different tempo so that the same time is played by 2/32nds.

It will take a bit of reading to understand it.

But you are missing the pulse of your piece. And you don't have any kind of phrase. Just write up a phrase of 8-16 bars and show it to us. Then people will be able to help you further. :)

And don't ask for forgiveness ( sorry). You are fine and keep asking to learn more. :)

Changing the tempo can fix the time used by the 16th notes but will mar its relationship with the neighboring notes. Unless i change the tempo for only those two notes, which is impractical.

You spotted my problem. I cant think about music through its beats/pulses. I am just singing it aloud and trying to write it down. But then to make the desired length of the notes I see no other way than to dot them without even thinking about the beats.

Omg i cant even start writing music. I only come up with crazy designs! Look at the above image. Is it performable? Could someone teach me how not to cross every measure with ties? When I try to put the notes with the exact length i want them to have I end up with totally unreadable music. I just hear the note and then go like "hmm i will add a dot to it, its too short".

I see nothing wrong with this rhythm per se. It is perfectly playable, and if it sounds right to you, use it. For readability it often helps to group notes in quavers, when it gets more complex.

Example:

This is the same rhythm, just with slightly different groupings, so that it's easily visible where one quaver ends and where the next one starts.

Again exactly the same rhythm, but this time the dotted 16th notes have also been regrouped into two sections of each one 8th note in length.

There is not one correct way to write this, and different composers have different preferences, and some musicians find one easier to read, some the other. I recommend trying to play your rhythms on an instrument, and seeing if they could be optimised for readability.

Of course, you can also slightly change the rhythm to make it much easier to read:

The part with the dotted 16th has been replaced by a triplet, and I cut the last "overhanging" 16th in the second bar. This will sound very similar to your rhythm, but is much easier to read. There are of course also many other similar rhythms that you could use. Note however that in the first two examples the rhythm stayed -exactly- the same. Only the notation changed. This time the rhythm is slightly different.

I see... So basically you keep from breaking the beats to get it easier to perform right?

Basically, yes. Of course when you have easy and common rhythms you don't have to "break it into beats", i.e. you can of course write a dotted quarter note followed by an 8th note, even though the dotted quarter laps over a "beat", as it's a very common rhythm that any musician will recognise at once. The more complex rhythms get the more helpful can it be to break them into quarters (tied over if necessary), or even 8th or 16th groupings. If it's a rhythm that is rather common however, a musician will recognise it as a whole and doesn't have to read it note by note.

But as I said, there's no rule about an optimal display of a rhythm. Different composer may write the very same rhythm in quite different ways, so it's important to develop a sense of what -you'd- find easy to read.

I see the problem as being that the composer wants to have artistic interpretation written down. I had this problem when I first started. I had always just listened to music and tried to write things as I heard them... But Gardener is right.