Measures out of alignment
Hi team. I'm really loving this program!
Would someone please tell me why my bars widths start changing from bars 13 through 16? They should be the same width as the line above them.
Also, I'm really not clear what a "System" is. Would someone explain that?
Many thanks.
- Lee
| Attachment | Size |
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| Lee's A Sailboat Slashes Gone.mscz | 7.31 KB |
Comments
Although your chord sheet may look like a text file, the underlying structure is a musical score.
In any musical score, measure widths are adjusted to accomodate not only notes, but also chord names as well. Have a look below and imagine if you had to shoe-horn two additional (complicated) jazz chords into measure 8, for instance:
Regards.
P.S.
A system is a set of staves played simultaneously:
Imagine a band conductor's score showing 18 instruments playing together. One line of music comprised of the staves for the various instruments is a system.
If you are notating slash notation for a single instrument, then the staff for that single instrument could be considered a system.
Also:
System text: Applies to all staves in a system, and gets propagated to part creation.
Staff text: Applies to a single staff in a system.
In reply to Although your chord sheet may by Jm6stringer
Okay, so the slight offset is perfectly normal? I haven't done anything wrong?
Good to know because I thought the two lines should have taken up the same space because the chord lengths were all the same. At some point, a chord (perhaps bar 7 because of the extra sharp character) has pushed things along a bit.
I can live with the anomaly as long as I haven't messed up the score. Many thanks (again!) JM :).
- Lee
P.S. Thanks for the definition of "System." Now I'm clear on that.
In reply to Okay, so the slight offset is by Lee Batchelor
It is indeed perfectly normal that measure widths vary. In regular music, they vary a *lot* - a whole note takes much less space than eight eighth notes, for instance.
You can actually disable the automatic spacing MuseScore adds for chords symbols. Go to Style / General / Chord Symbols, and set "Minimum chord spacing" to some negative value - like maybe -5sp. This value controls how much space MsueScore insists on between chord symbols. Setting it to -5sp means they are allowed to overlap by five staff-spaces. Obviously, you don't actually want them to overlap, but they won't, because you are forcing only eight measures per system. Still, giving MuseScore *permission* to voerlap the chords affects the spacing calculations in a way that works in your favor here if you want the measures to all be the same size.
In reply to It is indeed perfectly normal by Marc Sabatella
Very re-assuring Marc. I forgot that real music measures do vary in width! I'm a weak piano music reader but an excellent trumpet music reader. I should have remembered that from my trumpet playing days (about 150 years ago!). Thanks.
- Lee