How to expand for whole note?
Super newbie question - I'm trying to write out a piece of sheet music, but when I insert a whole note, the bar lines shrink to each side of it, but I want the bar to extend to account for the whole four counts. I was confused by the handbook's instructions, and tried to adjust the 'Actual' measure duration, but all it does is insert a rest for the remaining space. Attached a pic of what it looks like around the whole note, and I'm hoping someone can help me with expanding the bar for the whole notes? :(
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| wholenote.jpg | 7.22 KB |
Comments
Welcome.
Changes to an individual measure's Stretch (using Format→Stretch → Increase/Decrease Layout Stretch) are calculated after, and proportional to, the global Spacing setting.
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/measure
Another possibility is to increase the minimum measure width in the menu Format->Style->Measure. My guess is that about 10 would be where you want it.
Not sure if you're a newbie with MuseScore only or also a newbie to writing music, but to be clear: it's not normally considered correct for a measure containing a whole note to be as wide as a measure containing four quarter notes. The rules of music notation specifically say not to do that except in some very specific cases. Normally, a whole note should take less space than four quarter or two halves, etc.
In reply to Not sure if you're a newbie… by Marc Sabatella
I'm new to both. However, I have never seen any sheet of music where the bar lines hug the sides of a whole note like in the picture I displayed, which is what I want to fix. Thanks.
In reply to I'm new to both. However, I… by trulyrobyn1
It all depends on the density of the music - this would be very common in music with many measures per line, but the fewer measures on the line, the wider the measures will be. And MuseScore handles all that automatically - it knows the rules of music notation very well. So again, you normally should not need to mess with individual measure widths. You can insert line breaks or change some score settings to get fewer measure per line, and then things will automatically space themselves.
Speaking of which, it does look like you've been playing with some score settings already, as I see some things that don't look like the defaults. I would encourage you to attach your actual score, not just a picture, so we can advise better.