Editing beams

In our Time Signatures video, you learned about setting up default beam and rest groups, which determine how groups of notes, like eighth notes, are automatically beamed within each bar, whether they are beamed in groups of twos or fours or any other way. Like in this 4/4 bar here, let's go ahead and zoom in a little. Here in this 4/4 bar, our eighth notes are beamed in groups of 4, as you can see. In this video, you'll learn how to locally pinpoint and change the appearance of any beam that you see on your score page.

To do that, you need to bring up the keypad. If you don't see it on your screen already, then you can use Command+Option+K or Ctrl+Alt+K to bring up the keypad. We need to make our way to the third keypad layout, and this is for beaming. All of these buttons at the top of the third layout are for beaming. So this would be 7, 8, and 9 on your numeric keypad. Now in the keypad with these beaming buttons, what you see is what you are going to get, and let me explain what I mean by that.

If I select a note, you'll notice that this note has a stem and its beam goes to the left and to the right of the stem. And when I selected that note, you'll also notice in the keypad that it's showing me that exact picture. I've got a note with a stem and the beam going to the left and to the right. Now, if I want to change that, I can just select a different picture. So if I select this picture here, then Sibelius will adjust the beam in the score. We can also get rid of beams if we would like to. So we can select a note, and this button right here in the keypad has no beam, and when we select that, you'll notice that there is no beam attached to that note.

Now sometimes it affects the notes around it. So if we wanted to be maybe these two notes together, we would just select that note and choose the picture that we want and Sibelius will beam those for us. Now, another thing we can do is beam over rests and bar lines. So if we wanted to beam this note to this note, we could do that. And it wouldn't matter which note we selected; it would be the same button that would beam across the bar line for us-- it would be the center button. Now, if we change that back, I'll just show you, if we select this note also, we want that beam to go to the left and right.

It would be the same button to do the same thing. Down at the bottom of the score, we have some rests, so let's scroll down here a little. I am just going to drag the paper up. So let's show you how you can beam over the rests. The best way to do this is to actually attach a beam to the rest itself, rather than selecting the note. So I am going to select this rest here and just choose a beam for it; let's just beam it through like that. You can do this for any of these rests here and also across the bar line if we want to.

So beaming notes in Sibelius and getting all of the beams in your score to look exactly like you want them to all of the time is very simple. Remember to always start with a good beam and rest group setting in your time signature setup. Then when you need to make a local adjustment, select the note or rest, choose the desired stem and beam button from the keypad, and Sibelius will do the rest of the work for you.