Balancing the lengths of bars
Warning: Maiden post! Be nice to me, please...
I'm the "tame geek" in our singing group, and I'm here to learn how to help the group leader with MuseScore. I've created my first score, and started with 8 bars. I added the tune to "Ba Ba Black Sheep" (our leader is Barbara, and I used to have a toy sheep which I named "Ba Ba ra" - the Ram was called "Ba tholemew") so the connection is obvious,
I've ended up with two "rows", the first with 9 narrow bars, and the second with four wide bars. How can I even things up a bit?
I could probably find this in the online help (though it is more obscure than adding notes) but I wanted to take this opportunity of announcing my presence.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Swifty's First Test.mscz | 1.84 KB |
Comments
Drag the system break from the "Breaks and Spacers" palette to one of the baas on the first line.
(Pun intentional)
HTH
Michael
In reply to Drag the system break from by ChurchOrganist
You mean 'Line break', don't you?
In reply to Drag the system break from by ChurchOrganist
Excellent. Just what my score needed. Thank you.
Here is another thing you can try. This will even out the number of measures in each system. (This is not always a good thing, but for simple songs it can make everything look nice.)
1 Go to menu bar: Style > Edit General Style
2 On the left side of the General Style window, select "System"
3 After "Fix Number of Measures/System", type in the number 4
4 Check off "Fix Measure Width"
5 Click OK
The General Style window is a good thing to get familiar with. It has a lot of features that are useful for changing the spacing and the formatting of your file. Note that some of them, like the font sizes, do not kick in until you have closed the file and re-opened it.
In reply to Creating standard number of measures per system by Jake Sterling
Thank you for this suggestion. It is what I was hoping to find, and you've saved me from hours of fruitless search (I would have shied away from "System", as fiddling with "System" is the beginner's way of screwing up their PC).
Now I have multiple ways of achieving this objective; that's always comforting,
In reply to Thank you for this by Swifty
"System" is a fancy musical term for "line". But a bit more specific. Consider piano music - there are actually two staves in each "line" of music. So, a "system" means, a line consisting of *both* of those staves. A page of piano sheet music might consist of 8 "staves, but that's really 4 systems of two staves each. So in MuseScore, there is nothing scary about "system".
With that out of the way, I don't actually recommend messing with that particular option (the one to fix the number of measures per system). For one thing, it's inflexible - no way to allow for a pickup on the first line, or an extra mesasure of two on lines thaty have 1st and 2nd endings, etc. Also, lots of weird things can happen if you forget you have that option turned on and then starting messing with other aspects of page formatting - like the "stretrch" settings.
So for short pieces, I really recommend just inserting line breaks manually - click barline, hit Enter. For longer pieces where that might be more work than you want, try Plugins / Break Every X Measures. This will simply insert those breaks for you, achieving the same end result as the Fix option, but more "transparently" (you can actually see the line breaks that were isnerted, and delete them or add new ones as you see fit). This works on a selection, so if you want five measures on the first line (to include the pickup) but four on the rest, you can insert that first line break manually, then select the rest of the measures and run the plugin to insert breaks every 4 bars.
In reply to "System" is a fancy musical by Marc Sabatella
I agree that using Line Breaks is preferable to using the Style > System option and, actually, I mention that in my original response; but it is good to know how to use it, along with the other possibilities that are available in the Style menu; and for Baa, baa, Black Sheep, which I understood to be something that was written out as a learning exercise, it seemed like a good learning opportunity.