equal bar width?

• Apr 15, 2021 - 12:59

hi all.
im very new to muse score.
could someone please tell me how to get an equal bar width?
thanks

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Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Hi, Jojo!!!

Even the fact your words are absolutely true, I think there should be an option to get the equal width bars.

I'm a music teacher, and it is a very useful visual help to the first degrees of the school year.

I don't know if we could disable the auto width spacing, but... Why not to include it into the "BAR PROPERTIES" panel? ???

Blessings and Greetings from Chile!!!

JUAN

Why do you want equal bar widths?

MuseScore automatically makes the bar widths appropriate for their contents and to ensure that the first and last bars in a system touch the page margins. This conforms to standard practice for musical notation. The space allocated to a bar will take into account the number of notes/rests, different spacing allocated to notes and rests of different durations, whether there are accidentals attached to notes and what other elements such as time and key signatures are present. Bars with identical content my differ in length between systems as all bars in a system may be stretched proportionally to fill the space between page margins. Unless you have a special reason for making the bar widths the same everywhere, I recommend you just let MuseScore handle everything.

If you have a special case, bar widths can be adjusted in a number of ways see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/measure. If you tell us your particular reason for wanting bar widths, someone can probably advise the best way to go about it.

In reply to by SteveBlower

Simple application: I want to create a cheat sheet that shows a C Major scale in bass, tenor, alto, and treble clef. It would be helpful to precisely line up the notes and barlines to facilitate visual scanning. I can do it with the shift-bracket function, but it's not perfect and also a bit annoying because every adjustment in one bar changes the other bars also. An "equal measure width" function would take care of it.

In reply to by uliwid

Actually, scales are a perfect demonstration of what equalizing bar widths itself doesn't solve the issue. Consider, you could make each measure the full width of the screen, but if there are different clefs, different key signatures, or different accidentals on the notes, then the notes themselves won't align.

So that approach won't work no matter what. Instead of creating separate measures on different systems, you need one measure on one system, but multiple staves. That's what starting with the SATB template would do.
You'd just need to add the alto and tenor clefs.

As mentioned, measure width depends on the content of the measures, but also, it depends on how many are on the system. The only reason you are seeing odd results right now is that your score isn't done - you have a whole bunch of empty measures on the second system. As you start entering notes into them, they will expand automatically. You shouldn't need fiddle with spacing until you are done with your score, as any manual adjustments you make while it's still half empty will likely turn out to be counterproductive in the end.

When you're done, you can then worry about where to add system and breaks to balance the overall content for an even look.

In reply to by apricotandpearjam

You can, but again, see above - doing it before you finish your score is a mistake that leads to bad problems later, and in any event, is very rarely the best way to increase measure wdth even then (instead, simply add line breaks where desired). Trying to adjust things prematurely and individually is a recipe for creating scores that a) have bad spacing internally, b) look even worse if the font or page size ever changes c) taking much much much longer than necessary. There ins nothing whatsoever about the score you posted that should necessitate taking such drastic steps or needing to pay such large penalties for it.

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