On Oct 28, 2005, at 3:08 PM, Lon Price wrote:
How about in a piano part, where in one measure a note needs to be in layer 2, but there's no need to do layers in the next measure--all notes are layer 1. This happens to me all the time when writing piano music, and so far this bug hasn't bitten me, but I'll on the lookout for it in the future.
In that case I expect I'd want all the notes in the second measure to be in layer 2. For me, "no need to do layers" does not automatically translate into layer 1.
I'm curious about how others do this. Do you always use layer 1 if there's no second layer? For example, suppose you've got a piano piece with a bass part that has a persistent bass note keeping the beat throughout the piece, and in addition to that there are occasional melody fragments above that but still in the bass clef. Would you use layer 1 for measures which have only the low notes? That seems weird to me. If something is obviously a single music line or motif, I want to keep it in the same layer, not bounce it around based on whether there are notes above it or below it.
I like making my layers match the internal logic of the music. Even if the printed page looks exactly the same whether a note is in layer 1 or layer 2, I'll always put them all in the "right" layer just because it pleases my sense of correctness. Perhaps this is correlated to, um, other respects in which David F and I have a similar attitude.
I don't know if it has ever made a difference on layers specifically, but I can think of several examples -- in Finale and elsewhere -- where the general philosophy of setting things up properly the first time even if it makes no difference in the result for the immediate output, has saved me headaches down the road when something needs to be changed.
Anyway, I think we all agree that Finale *should* be able to draw the slur properly, but as bugs go this is a pretty easy one to get around, isn't it? How hard is it to swap the notes into the right layers to make it draw right? Even if you're haphazard about your layers in normal practice, it's a simple matter to fix it when you get a buggy slur. If it's an simple fix, fine, but if addressing this bug eats up time resources for MakeMusic, I can think of plenty of other bugs that are much harder to kludge around.
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