Pizzicato User Forum

I have just been looking at your website and have not found the answer to a very important question. I arrange a great deal of music for church choirs and also write some original. Much of the music I am arranging is plainsong and other chant which has no time signature or for that matter beats. I have tried using Sibelius software for this, but find it very unforgiving in that it requires time signatures and then expects a definite number of beats within a measure. As there are no beats in chant, I have need of music writing software which will allow me to chose to use or not use time signatures and beats within measures. Will Pizzicato give me this option? Thanks, Carl Fisher

Hi Carl,

Thank you for your email. Yes Pizzicato Professional 3.3 can do that. It is called "free measures". You can set an attribute to a set of measures so that you can define the beat (quarter note, half note, 8th note,...) and you can thereafter set any number of notes inside one mesure
without the need to specify the time signature for each measure.

You can create an example quite easily :

- Start Pizzicato in Professional demo mode
- Select all measures of the default score (Edit, Select all)
- Go in Edit, Measure parameters...
- Check "Measure duration" and set it on "Free on the basis of a ... " then select the duration you want.
- You can now enter any number of notes in a measure and they will be
played and justified.
You can also adjust the measures width if needed, for instance when you have finished encoding the notes, and create a new page setup so that all measures look balanced.

Dominique - ARPEGE, Belgium