large meters meter for free rythm

Hello Ian,

There are two issues here: (1) How you want to reveal the metric structure of your music, regardless of the notation tool you're using. How would you do this with pencil and paper? (2) How to accomplish that with Notation Composer.

I assume that you're looking for advice only on #2. There are recommendations I could make for #1 also, but that would just be my opinion as an amateur composer.

Here are the options that Composer offers that will enable you to pull off mostly anything you want, some of which are admittedly work-arounds:

1. Composer supports irregular meter, such as 5/8 or 7/8.
2. You can force the beaming within a meter by editing the meter symbol. An option in the Meter dialog is the "beaming pattern".
3. You can also manually change the beaming anywhere in any measure. You can break beams between notes, and join beams between notes, and also change the secondary beaming (for example, where the second 16th note beam lies).
4. You can work-around Composer's limitation of large meters by breaking up the large measure into smaller meters, where you'd like the beaming breaks to happen.
5. There is an option to hide the display of meters.
6. If you want to display a large meter value like 93/8, then use the Free Text tool to manually place the "93" and "8" text on the staff.

Some of the above is, again, admittedly work-arounds for lack of complete flexibility in large meter numerators. Notation Composer is optimized for everyday musicians who rarely need this. If your scores tend to be exotic, then you might be better off using a more advanced notation program (that is also more difficult to use and more expensive than Composer) such as Finale or Sibelius.

Cheers
-- Mark