Way to make staves bigger so i don't go blind if I actually try to play my song?

• Feb 5, 2014 - 20:25

They are awfully small.

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• Feb 5, 2014 - 21:18

Are you judging by the screen or the print? How are you creating the score? Can you post an example?

By default, scores should come out pretty much exactly the same size as most printed music published in the past couple of centuries. If you use the plain "lead sheet" template, they come out the size of those fakebooks that print extra-small to cram in as many songs as possible. If you use the "Jazz Lead Sheet" template, they come out extra big like how most jazz fakebooks are printed these days. Other templates use sizes typical for their genre, except I believe the "Piano" template is small for no good reason.

As shown above, you can always override the size via layout / page settings / space. But starting with the right template for the job helps.

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• Feb 5, 2014 - 22:22

I am using the piano template. I am going by the number of staves per sheet & the number of measures (7) per line compared to my other songbooks (5) & printouts. I expected this song to take up one page and it's just half with the title.
I know how to zoom in on the computer but I don't keep my computer on the piano......
If this isn't something that can be changed I sure would like to see staff size options on the next release for those of us whose eyes aren't so great.
I did find teh 'space' option but it leaves giant gaps between the staves & actually I don't think it changed the size of the notes much.
I haven't printed out a lot of music because they are usually too small for me. Most piano books you buy are oversize with corresponding larger print. I would like to be able to have that size print on the smaller paper.

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• Feb 5, 2014 - 23:00

See above. Both response mentioned Layout / Page Settings / Space as the way to override the staff size. The space option does *not* leave gaps in the music - it literally controls the size of the space betwene staff lines. It changes notes by the exact amount you tell it to - this parameter is literally setting the size of the staff space, and hence the heigh of a notehead.

However, it is true that once you change that, this affects other aspects of page layout. My guess is whatever change you tried to make ended up affecting how many staves were able to fit on a page, which in turn affected whether the Page Fill Threshold (in Style / General / Page) was exceeded - and *that* night have added space between systems. But that dialog allows you to control all that as well.

I am not sure what you mean by "most piano books you buy are oversize with corresponding larger print". Larger compared to what? Most piano books - except ones meant for children, I guess - have a fairly standard staff size. As I mentioned above, that is actually the size you get by default in MuseScore *unless* you use a template that overrides it. And the Piano template is indeed strange - it sets the staff size much smaller than normal. Not sure why it's set up that way. I'd recommend skipping that when creating piano scores and just creating your score from scratch - fewer steps than creating from template then changing the staff size. The default staff size should then be fine. But again, if you do wish staves larger than standard, the Space parameter does that.

Most other templates work well in my experience.

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• Feb 6, 2014 - 00:09

Well that was weird. I have no idea what I did but the notes are the size I like them now without wasting paper. It's one full page.
Is there a way to make the space between the title & the music smaller? I couldn't figure that out.
I meant the sheets in a music book are larger than printer paper.
I will take your advice & start with my own template next time.
Thank you.

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• Feb 6, 2014 - 06:32

The paper itself for most printed music in the US is indeed larger than Letter.

As for space below title, in answering questions like this, it usually helps to post a sample score so we can see what you are seeing. There normally wouldn't be much space at all between the title and the first line of music unless the page fill has stretched things out - in fact, it's probably more common to want to add *more* space than the default. So I'm guessing you need to deal with the page fill first. If you want even less space than what results after you make sure page fill is not adding unnecessary space, you can adjust the vertical frame lower margin parameter or music upper margin in style / general / page. See Layout and formatting for more info.

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• Aug 14, 2015 - 23:37

Marc,

You're right about standard size but keep in mind score books are printed professionally on bright paper with perfect dark print. So at times it would appear to be a similar size but the fact is a printer will not be able to put notes down as cleanly as in a book purchased, so increasing size is useful option. Also a question of the number of people using musescore who are professional or classical sight readers, my guess would be minimal.

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• Aug 14, 2015 - 23:32

Marc

I have a related question, seems like you may have the answer. For my students who are kids, at times I would love to create prints for them with larger staves/notes etc. The standard isn't working for the jazz and pop charts, the musicians complain about the size of the chord notations, especially when we are performing in dimly lit clubs but in general jazz guys tend to favor large print. You mentioned the jazz lead sheet template... Where do I locate that in musescore?

Also when including lyrics and chords, the sheet is so dense notes and words are literally overlapping one another. So I manually fix that by adding some vertical space in layout/page settings/space. However I didn't notice that had any effect on note size. If I also wanted to increase the actual size of the staves and notes for the kids, how would I go about that?

Leon

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• Aug 15, 2015 - 00:04

When you first create your score, it asks what template you want. Scroll down a ways, you'll see Jazz Lead Sheet in the "Jazz" section. It has slightly larger than normal staves, and much larger than normal chord symbols - very close to the size of staves and chord symbols found in common fakebooks like the "Real Book" etc.

To change staff size, see Layout / Page Settings, the "Staff space" setting (literally the size of the spaces between staff lines; everything else scales accordingly). You can also change chord symbol size in Style / Text / Chord Symbol.

As for your charts looking "dense", there are lots of different ways to control layout. Hard to say what might be going on or what to recommend without seeing your actual score - you can attach it via the "File attachments" link right below where you type your reply here.

But here, for example, is a typical jazz chart made from the Jazz Lead Sheet template:

https://musescore.com/marcsabatella/scores/705156

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• Feb 8, 2014 - 21:14

Select the last measure of the first page;
Create / Measures / Append Vertical Frame;
Double-click the newly created frame;
Drag the handle (increases the frame size and pushes upwards staves).

post scriptum
do the same thing with the frame of the title (you can reduce it to one line)

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