Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge Notation in 6/8 time

If I want to make a note duration worth 5 eighth notes (5 beats) in 6/8 time, do I create a tie, with the first note in the tie being a dotted quarter and the second one being a regular quarter note?

Also, let's say I have two voices per clef, with treble clef being one melody and one accompaniment and in the bass clef both accompaniment. For both clefs, one voice occasionally "overlaps" the other voice, meaning that one voice has the same note as the other voice at the same beat. (see the attached file at http://musescore.org/en/node/12753 for a visual aid; it also addresses the question above). Should this be notated as one voice or for both voices? Meaning, should there be a double stem, one for each voice, every time the voices overlap each other?

Please help me. Thank you.

The convention is to avoid writing notes that span the gap between quaver three and quaver four in 6/8 time. That is, it would look odd if you wrote a five-quaver note value as a tied group of crotchet-crotchet-quaver, even thought the total duration would be the same.

In the example you give, it's not clear that you could write it differently than you have. The two different voices in the treble clef are perfectly distinguishable. There will be occasions where it will be confusing to stem together two identical notes in different voices, but this this doesn't seem to be one of those occasions.

Yes to everything. It's all correct.

That's how I'd do it. That's what I've seen in lots of triplet-heavy scores (Baroque stuff especially), and it makes it a bit easier to read -- lots easier to sight read since people can count 1-2-3 in their heads and keep up more easily.

And I've always seen two stems on a note with two voices (less frequently two notes next to one another so that they're touching).

I don't think this is just a matter of personal preference -- not entirely, anyway. In contrapuntal music where there is much crossing of lines, it's often much easier to follow if the notes are kept on separate stems. For example, if voices cross but, at the point where they share the note, one voice has a crotchet and the other a quaver, it's quite confusing to put them on the same stem.