User control of bar lengths

• Nov 24, 2012 - 16:50

In a single piece of music there is maybe a need for deciding bar lengths oneself, locally. How is this done? I found only the General Style/Measure control feature for spacing, which seems to apply to the whole piece.


Comments

It would help to see the specific score you are having trouble with, and more specific description of what you would like to see done, since there are so many different elements to page layout. But in general, the increase/reduce stretch commands (under the Layout menu, or shortcuts "{" and "}") allow you to make individual measures (or selections of measures) wider or narrower than the default. Also, if you insert line breaks where you want them, MuseScore will automatically space those lines out appropriately. So one useful method can be to deliberately reduce stretch score-wide (or use the global setting in style / edit general style / measure) to get measures a little narrower on average than you want, which will result in more measure per line than you want., Then just insert line breaks to get the measures per line that you want, which will automatically space things as you want. Then if there are particular places where you want *more* measures per line, you can select those regions and hit "{" until they squeeze onto a line together.

See:

Layout and formatting
Break or spacer
Measure operations

Also the video tutorials on page layout that you can access from the main musescore.org page. The "Tour" you can access from the main page (or any page, via the menu at right) can also be useful to give you an idea of what MuseScore is capable of and where to look in the manual to find more info.

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