Organ with three staves (Man + Ped): Reducing the space between Grand Staff and Pedal

• Jun 9, 2024 - 16:09

Hi everyone!
the attached file contains three staves for choir and a grand staff + a single staff for organ (Man + Ped). When I enable the vertical justification, the distance between grand staff and pedal-staff is very large - it does not look very natural to me. I tried to change the settings for the vertical spacing, but the results are also not convincing. I also tried to reduce the value for Extra distance above staff in the Staff/Part properties, but it seems it is not possible to enter negative values. It seems that the only way to handle this is to add a Staff spacer fixed down for each system, but that seems a lot of work.
Does anyone have a good alternative to handle this problem?


Comments

When staves are encompassed by a { brace, they are treated as a grand staff and kept closer together (following the value in "Max. grand staff distance"). The organ poses a special problem to this because it has an extra stave outside the brace. However! You can cheat the system by adding a brace encompassing all three staves and then making it invisible:
pic-selected-240610-0723-40.png

Another way round the problem (probably less satisfactory) would be to set "Max. grand staff distance" to a very high value, so that it would never have any effect. This would mean the three organ staves would be more equally spaced (without extra space between the bottom manual stave and the pedals), but they would be more widely spaced in general.

In reply to by oktophonie

Oho, learned something new today, this is true in 4.x and also in (at least) 3.6.2. Wasn't the case in 3.5.2 and I missed it all that time...
Now finally the German translation of "Akkolade" makes full sense, same as the name for that curly brace

Added this info to the handbook(s)...

You know, I hadn't noticed this until you pointed it out--now I'm gonna have to go back through all my organ scores and correct it, or it will bug the hell out of me:-0

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