Adjusting spacing hide invisible rests

• Apr 5, 2014 - 17:24

Hi, I'm arranging a score with some odd phrasing, and I'd like to adjust the spacing of the notes and rests to make it look better on the page when I print it out - I've attached a file to show the problem. The composer has put groups of 4 semiquavers, but the timing would demand quavers to make the right amount of notes in a bar. MuseScore has helpfully corrected the timing with an invisible rest. My problem is, that rest is taking up space - so when I print the music, there is a gap there. I've tried adjusting the leading and trailing spaces for the rest, but that doesn't help. I've also tried making the rests small - that helps a bit, but not enough. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks for your help,
Jane Test_score.mscz Test_score.mscz

Attachment Size
Test_score.mscz 2.04 KB

Comments

I'm not really understanding. Isn't this just a pickup / upbeat / anacrusis? If so, then no need for invisible rests, which mess up playback as well as layout. Instead, simply right click the measure and set the desired "Actual duration".

In reply to by Jane Bass Clarinet

From what you're describing it sounds as though the composer wishes to indicate 8 notes in the space of 6 quavers and these would "usually" be shown as two groups of 4 quavers but I've seen them written as semi-quavers too and the meaning is pretty obvious.

I would tackle this in one of two ways:

1]
Change actual measure duration to 3/8
Create two dotted-quaver rests
Click on each in turn and press [Ctrl]4
Enter the notes as semiquavers

This gets the appearance right but affects playback. If playback is an issue you can enter a tempo marking at half the speed of the rest of the piece, enter a tempo marking in the next measure to reset the seed and then make those markings invisible.

2]
Leave the measure duration and speed
Create two dotted-crotchet rests
Click on each and [Ctrl]-2 to make them couplets or doublets
Enter the notes as semi-quavers
Make the tuplet numbers invisible
Add in a couple of '4's from the fingering palette and drag them to the correct places in relation to the tuplets.

So, having posted a question asking for help and then having solved it 10 minutes later, how did you go about it?

In reply to by underquark

I extracted the parts I wanted from the score, and changed the duration of the bars accordingly - either 3/8 or 9/16 depending on the sort of rest I wanted to lose. At the moment, I'm mainly interested in getting these printed out, but your second suggestion would be very useful for future reference - since I could do that with the main score, before part extraction. As I said, these things are dotted around, so I can't just change the duration on the main score, as that would affect other parts that didn't have a quadruplet at that point.
Thanks for the help!

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.