Can I change spacing within a measure?
I stretched my initial pick-up measure (using the "}" brace), in order to align the bars with those of the next line of music.
Unfortunately that stretches out the two beamed eighth-notes across the measure. My intent is to just stretch the white-space at the left of the notes, so that the notes are right-aligned within the measure.
Is there a way to reposition the notes horizontally within a measure?
-David
Comments
Not sure without seeing this why you would want to right-align those notes, but here is how to move a note without affecting anything else:
1. Select the note you want to move, push F8 to open the Inspector, and adjust the horizontal offset until the note is where you want it to be.
2. To move more than one note at a time, select them by clicking on each in turn while holding down Left CTL, then adjust the horizontal offset for Chord in the Inspector.
In reply to Not sure without seeing this by Recorder485
Thanks for your reply. I tried the note offset feature in the inspector. Unfortunately, that only moves the head of the note, which is not what I want to accomplish.
Attached is a photo of some music after the initial pick-up measure has been stretched in order to better align the bars with the bars of the subsequent lines of music.
I would like the first line's pick-up notes to look like the pick-up notes in the other lines, not stretched out over the entire measure, but, rather, right-aligned.
Is moving the entire note (head, tail and stem) horizontally possible?
David
In reply to Thanks for your reply. I by dddiam
To answer your actual question, yes, it is possible, but for a single note you'll need to move the note-head first, and then select the stem and move that, and (if applicable) the beam and move that. Either that, or select the note-head, stem, and beam in sequence (holding down L-CTL all the time), and then move that whole group of elements under the 'chord' heading.
However, good music typography does NOT require bar-lines to line up vertically in succeeding lines of music. I don't see any need for you to align that pick-up measure with the ones on the following lines of music. If you insist on having all your bar-lines aligned vertically throughout an entire piece of music, your printed score will look very odd indeed.
In reply to Thanks for your reply. I by dddiam
I think if you really want that sort of non-standard layout where the pickup takes as much room as a normal measure, you should not create it as a pickup in the first place, but as a normal measure, with the first three beats rest, and then you can make those rests invisible. Then everything will lay out as you are describing.
But you should definitely ask yourself if it is really worth going to that trouble just to create non-standard layout when the standard layout would be more familair to most readers.
In reply to I think if you really want by Marc Sabatella
Thank you to all who replied. Your suggestions are all good.
And I agree that other musicians don't care.
Although I have played a variety of instruments my entire life, it is only in the past year that I have decided to learn to read musical notation, and I still falter a little with it. So the alignment is only for my own benefit. I plan to improvise and write down changes to that piece, and the symmetry helps me get a better integrated, all-at-once feel for the piece. As I add variations, the differences will pop out at me.
Thanks for your help.
Regards,
David
In reply to Thank you to all who replied. by dddiam
It's not that other musicians 'don't care', it's that there are standards for music typography that should be adhered to. Imagine if you were writing a simple text on a page and insisted on trying to line up the beginnings of every word in each succeeding line of type. Your text would resemble a columnar table and the reader would have a great deal of trouble following the sense of the words.
In general, MuseScore will place things appropriately for good music notation, so until you have more experience reading music, it would be best for you to let it do so.