Changing individual slurs to flat slurs

Although they are not often used as standard, some publishers use flat slurs in order to reduce the vertical space occupied by slurs. You can change individual slurs to flat slurs, independently of your project-wide setting. You can do this for the current layout and frame chain only, or for all layouts and frame chains.

Note

Short slurs, that is, slurs between only a few notes, can look odd as flat slurs, so it may not be appropriate to select the flat curvature style project-wide. However, it would also be unusual only to use flat slurs once or twice in a project. Therefore, we recommend that you avoid changing the curvature style for only one or two slurs in a project.

It can be more effective to modify them rather than changing their curvature style; for example, by making an individual slur thicker/thinner, adjusting the shoulder offset of slurs, or adjusting their height using their slur height handles in Engrave mode.

Prerequisite

  • The lower zone is shown.

  • Properties is selected in the lower zone toolbar.

  • If you are in Engrave mode, Graphic Editing Graphic Editing button is selected in the Engrave toolbox.

  • You have chosen the appropriate property scope for local properties.

Procedure

  1. Select the slurs whose curvature style you want to change. You can do this in Write mode and Engrave mode.
  2. In the Properties panel, activate Curvature type in the Slurs group.
  3. Choose one of the following options:

    • Normal (curved)

    • Flat

Result

The curvature style of the selected slurs is changed. If the property scope was set to Locally, this change only takes effect in the current layout and frame chain.

Tip

You can change the curvature style of all slurs project-wide in the Design section of the Slurs page in Engraving Options.