Fix the width of a single bar
Hi: can anyone help?
I'm scoring numbers for a stage musical. One number lasts a single bar, but needs to be handled as a separate piece of music. How do I adjust it to a sensible size?
Only Style>General Style>Page>Last system fill threshold seems to make any difference (or Shift + { or }, which seems to do something similar). At thresholds greater than 30% I get a full page width (sample 1 uploaded) which is far too wide. At 30% or less I get the crazily compacted version (sample 2). Is there no way to get something in between? Can MuseScore perhaps allow for manual adjustment of individual bar widths: that would be a major advance, to judge from many other comments.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Sample 1.jpg | 33.93 KB |
| Sample 2.jpg | 54.92 KB |
Comments
append a horizontal frame and resize that to your needs
In reply to append a horizontal frame and by Jojo-Schmitz
This works fine; thanks a lot. For some reason Musescore has now added an empty half bar to the end of the piece, but anything is better than it was!
In reply to Many thanks by FrankO
Could you post an example? What constitues a half bar?
In reply to Could you post an example? by Marc Sabatella
It's pretty clear that the obvious buggy outcome here has to do with my trying to tremolo the two chords. The tremolo link between the two has vanished now I've re-opened the file, but the vertical lines each side of the breve/whole note chords are still there. No longer an issue of huge importance, but something that needs tidying up, I guess.
Edited to add: I see the time signature in the first staff has shifted, too. I guess the software's not likely to be at its best with a one bar piece of music!
In reply to Here's the screen dump by FrankO
Yes, it looks like this has become corrupted somehow. I don't suppose you can reproduce this starting from a good measure? Normally, MuseScore actually does normally work pretty well with only a single measure, if you use a spacer to size it well. So you *shouldn't* be seeing anything like the above.
In reply to Yes, it looks like this has by Marc Sabatella
I've redone the measure, screen shot attached (One bar part 1), and this file is not (yet) corrupted.
Please note that, in creating the tremolo, MuseScore has not removed the original minim/half note stems.
I saved the file and re-opened it (this is all reproducing what happened before). See One bar part 2 attached. The file now has the same corrupted appearance as in my earlier post.
Please note two points.
The first is that I'd really like to be able to juggle the bar over to the left of the page but keep its width sensible; a horizontal frame seems to enter before the selected bar, making this impossible. (Why oh why can't we just grab bar lines and pull them right and left to set bar widths ourselves in an intuitive and simple manner?
The second is that the tremolo function seems to be an area of the software in need of attention. I've used it quite a bit lately, and it almost always creates problems. One of the most curious anomalies that I've seen in MuseScore - most often when XML pages from other software are opened in the program - is the phantom bar with too few beats in it. Deleting the bar's contents does not restore the bar to the same number of beats as its neighbours: it has to be Ctl+deleted. Now suppose, working only in MuseScore, you have a bar of, let's say, 4 beats and you create a tremolo over beats 1 and 2, with plain notes on beats 3 and 4, then you delete the tremolo portion of the bar, you often create the same kind of phantom bar (it behaves as if it has only 3 beats).
In reply to Sorry, couldn't get straight back to this by FrankO
If you want that bar to be left of the page, you need to append a frame, assume that bar is the last in score, otherwise insert a frame having the next bar selected.
In reply to If you want that bar to be by Jojo-Schmitz
You are, of course, absolutely right. Silly of me to have missed the option to append a horizontal frame two entries down from 'insert horizontal frame' in the Create>bar menu (a strange place to look for frames in the first place). I thought I wanted to insert a frame, only after the bar not before it, and should have paid closer attention to semantics here. Please note the only instruction in the MuseScore manual:
Create a frame
First select a measure. The command to insert a frame is found in the menu
Create → Measures . The frame is inserted before the selected measure (my italics, because there's no mention of appending in the instructions).
I hope that the program documentation will be improved when version 2 comes along.
In reply to Yes, it looks like this has by Marc Sabatella
I got back to my scoring work. Wrote two bars with a piano tremolo. Saved and reopened the file. See the attachment to this post. This makes it pretty clear that the tremolo problems arise when a tremolo is between a chord and a single note, as often happens in piano music. The single-note tremolos remain fine, but the ones involving a chord retained the original minim stems then caused the massive corruption you see in the attachment after save and reopen. I hope this helps to pinpoint the source of the problem.
In reply to Hoo boy; yep, MuseScore doesn't like tremolos by FrankO
I tried to reproduce, bout couldnÄt get it to corrup my score?
The half note cord and hlf note singele note turned into full notes when applying the trmolo to the chord.
Save and reload didn't show any corruption.
Could you try to decribe a step by step procedurwe to reproduce this?
And attach the score (a sample score), rather than pictures of it?
Well, if you could, this should go into the issue tracker...