Increasing and Decreasing Space Between Individual Staves Without Affecting the Entire Piece
Long title, I know. I'm a up-and-coming playwrite who is trying to make a transition from hand-written librettos to a libretto written in a software and chose Musescore because I heard it was fun and easy to learn. However, I'm not accustomed to all of the features. A particular problem of mine is that I am wishing to create space between two individual staves in the music to leave space for dialogue in the music. I'm can't seem to find out how and when I used the solution that I saw when I looked it up, all of the staves of music were spread apart, which is not what I wanted. Is there a solution to this?
Comments
You can increase the distance individually by using spacers, but you cannot decrease individualy, not on 2.x at least, so there make sure to set the (min) distances properly and only increase where needed.
See https://musescore.org/en/handbook/breaks-and-spacers, https://musescore.org/en/handbook/layout-and-formatting#style-edit-gene… and https://musescore.org/en/handbook/staff-properties#common-staff-propert…
As far as dialog is concerned, you will want some sort of frame. Read up on them to pick the best option for your score.
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/frame
In reply to As far as dialog is by mike320
Well, yes, vertical frames with negative distance above/below might serve as means to decrease individual staff distance, at last until 3.0 gets released and its fixed spacers.
To increase individually spaces are the better choice though, in 2.x (in 1.x I used vertical frames for that too, as there spacers didn't play nicely with hidden empty staves)
In reply to Well, yes, vertical frames by Jojo-Schmitz
Yes, negative distance of a vertical frame did solve my problem: decrease the space between two individual staves! Many many thanks Jojo-Schmitz!! Danke, ich hab so lange gesucht ....
In reply to Yes, negative distance of a… by gblatt
It is a pretty mean hack though ;-), "Distance above" seems to make no difference BTW, only "Distance below"
And if you change that frame to have Distance below -8 instead of -18 you can reduce its Height from 10 to 0, and the frame doesn't show anymore and nobody can a) see your trickery and b) easily modify it again ...
In reply to Yes, negative distance of a… by gblatt
It's also totally unnecessary in this case.
All you need to do is decrease the min and max system distance (note: these are systems, not staves, so you need to use the proper settings) in Style / General / Page. In fact, it would have worked better had you not already increased these from their default - the defualts actually work pretty well already. But since you apparently like your spacing tighter than the defualt, maybe consider values of 6sp for both min & max. The systems with only one line of lyrics (or none) will obey this, and the other systems automatically adjust for the additional lyrics, giving you exactly what you want right from the start.
So to fix in your file:
1) remove the unnecessary frame
2) set your min & max system distance both to 6sp
Result will be just like what you got, but with less effort, and better yet, it keeps working forever, no need to constantly fiddle with adding frames system by system.
In reply to It's also totally… by Marc Sabatella
Yes, how foolish, I apologize ...
One thing to clarify: I believe what you are actually wanting to do is increase the distance between *systems*, not *staves*. That is, you probably don;t want the dialog to appear somewhere between the flute part and the oboe part for the same measure - you want it to appear between one whole bracketed line of measures for all instruments and the next whole bracketed line of measures for all instruments. System = bracketed line of measures. Even if you are wriging your music for only a single instrument (eg, like a lead sheet), it's still considered a system. So make sure when searching for information you keep this in mind.
Anyhow, indeed, what you want are indeed frames. Text frames specifically. Set the overall min/max system distances as appropriate for the places where you are *not* inserting dialog, then insert frames where you want the dialog.
Note that if your work is more text than music, you are almost certainly better off creating it in a word processor and then pasting in your musical excerpts as graphics. See the image capture tool in MuseScore for that, or just export your individual songs as graphics using File / Export.