Margins and Music Engraving Discussion.
Hello everyone, learning something new each day about composing and engraving with Musescore 2.1. I use the default margins with Musescore 2.1 which is 10 Top, 10 Left and right, and 20 bottom. What do you use? Is this a solid standard for engraving within US Letter size music? I only use odd page margins and keep it consistent throughout. When would I need or have to change the Margins? When do you have to change them from the current default in Musescore? I am going all out nerd mode with engraving and dissecting each part to make my sheet music look PRO. Thank you.
Comments
You wrote:
When do you have to change them from the current default in Musescore?
One reason would be if binding the pages into a book/pamphlet. The chosen method of binding may require a larger margin along that edge of the score pages.
Regards.
In reply to You wrote: When do you have by Jm6stringer
Elaine Gould in "Behind Bars" p481 offers this advice:
MARGINS
Allow at least 15mm / 0.5" for all borders around the printed area of a page - more for a binding edge. A blank margin is essential to allow for the possibility of trim error when printing or photocopying.
In reply to Elaine Gould in "Behind Bars" by DanielR
I believe she is referring to A4 scores and european sizes. I wish she would've posted some numbers about US legal size paper;however, I tried out 15mm margins and it seems rather excessive for me. Great book.
In reply to Elaine Gould in "Behind Bars" by DanielR
I may just go with similar margin sizes with the US letter size scores. I live in the US and am going to output all my scores to our standard even though I think it is ridiculous that we are using different size papers. Also going to input all my markings in english. Just thinking out loud.
In reply to You wrote: When do you have by Jm6stringer
Cool. Thanks Jm6stringer.
Margins are a personal decision, dependent in large part on intended usage. But I think it safe to say that anything that yields nice round numbers in millimeters as opposed to inches won't be especially common in the US.
Anyhow, you can set defaults in the tempalte you use for your particular type of score, or to set overall program-wide defaults, use Style / Save Style to create a style file then set that as your default in Edit / Preferences / Score.
In reply to Margins are a personal by Marc Sabatella
Thanks Marc Sabatella.
We use a special piece of paper for the orchestral parts: 10x13inch
It's a size very close to B4. But it's not exactly the same.
The measures we use for the margins are: for all sides .75in; for binding-side: extra 0.25in //Yes, its very simple :)
for odd pages: 0.75in 1.0in 0.75in 0.75in for even pages: 0.75in 0.75in 1.0in 0.75instaff space is: (approx) 0.07in. //between 0.06 ~ 0.08 in.
printing area is: 8.25x11.5in.
I don't claim to be a standard. This information is based on experience.
You can try different margins with different page sizes. But the logic is more or less the same as above.
An example for US-letter size page margins: use 0.6in for all sides and add extra 0.2in for binding-side //Yes, printing area is a bit small. But it is good in terms of printing.
MuseScore's default margins are also suitable for personal printing.
The bottom 20mm space is good for Copyright and other extra information. If you want, you can reduce it.
In reply to We use a special piece of by Ziya Mete Demircan
Thanks Ziya Mete Demircan for sharing your suggestions and numbers. Helps a lot. This is cool.
In reply to Thanks Ziya Mete Demircan for by Daniel Ani
Why would you need a larger margin if you bind the music into "books"? All bound music I possess opens flat, including piano parts. In the old days large margins were forced by the binding technology they used but I don't think that still applies.
If you want to put your music into ring binders (a good option if you don't have binding equipment) you'll need enough margin to accommodate the two or three holes though. Similarly for spiral binding.
Personally I prefer small margins (and a size about 10% smaller than MS default) so the number of page turns can be minimized.
In reply to Why would you need a larger by azumbrunn
Not sure what kind of binding is employed by the books you use currently, but I can assure you that glued or stitched bindings that do not lie flat are still extremely common. So larger inner margins are often recommended for that reason.
Another reason for larger margins in general is that this is where musicians are often going to want to write in their own performance or study notes.
In reply to Why would you need a larger by azumbrunn
Funnily, all the old women in my choir thanked me for my redone scores because they could finally read the notes (average age is >60 here, I’m the young one…).
I still lowered spatium to 1.75 (“good for distance reading, sharing scores, or the elderly” according to Elaine Gould) or occasionally 1.675 (“ideal size in good lighting conditions”, smallest which seems practical; we get many sheet music in MUCH smaller though which is hard to read to even me) and sometimes borders/inter-system space a bit so I get two of SATB+Piano on each A4 page if possible.
Mind that the location in which people perform often has suboptimal lighting, etc.
Something I tried earlier but then suffered through a bad case of it and now try to avoid is to condense measures… a bit too dense may look suddenly unbearable. Though, with lyrics, most are automatically wide enough by default, and one can condense a few for better spacing within the line. My beginner’s mistake was to try to use that to force automatic linebreaks because I dislike the manual linebreaks from the palette (still do, a bit, but I recognise they’re the lesser evil).