Reduce space between select staves (not all)?

• Aug 14, 2019 - 05:51

Attempting to create a sheet of study material that includes several excerpts. I want to reduce the space between staves of one excerpt, but keep space between different excerpts wide in order to distinguish them. How may I be able to do this?


Comments

Well, the literal answer is to use "fixed" staff spacer on the Breaks & Spacers palette. But, that's not necessarily the best answer. For various reasons, you may be better off reducing the default system distance (min and/or max, found in Format / Style / Page), and then increasing it between excerpt, where you may also be placing explanatory text or at least titles / numbers etc. If you attach an example, we can advise better.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Reducing the space between staves may be the better option. In version 3, if more space is needed, MuseScore will automatically provide it unless you have a fixed staff spacer. As Marc said, attach a score and people will be more that happy to give you ideas on how you might affect the spacing.

In reply to by Joseph Fry

The score has a .mscz extension on it. A PNG is only a picture of the score. With the score someone could explain the settings to get the view you want.

From the picture it looks like you have a single instrument. I would probably use a fixed distance spacer down (it looks like a capital i) and adjust it to move the staves closer together that need adjusted.

In reply to by Joseph Fry

It's kind of six of one, half dozen of the other, but I'd still personally prefer to reduce the default distance - the distance that would be used within a single example - then add space between examples. For one thing, it's the more "logical" way and maps better to what is actually happening musically. But also, given you might well be adding text frames between the examples anyhow to make it clearer to the reader that one exercise has ended and the next has begun, you may end up realizing you don't even need the extra space.

To reduce the default, see Format / Style / Page / Max system distance. Then normal spacers or frames can be used between excerpts as desired.

Not that it doesn't work to use fixed spacers to reduce the space, it just feels wrong to me. It's about the same amount of work either way.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I figured not needing to change the spacing between systems was one step less if you reduce the spacing where you want less, rather than reducing all spacing then increasing it back to the same distance for some of the gaps.

I guess it doesn't feel wrong to me because I have used this a couple of times on pages of symphonic music where I could almost fit a system on a page. Rather than decreasing the scaling for the entire score, I used the fixed spacers, decreased the distance and squoze some of the staves a little closer together.

In reply to by mike320

Yeah, but to me that's a different use case, one where fixed spacers do make sense. You like your staff spacing in general, but one page you want them different. Here, the real issue is that the default spacing is just too big for this particular score.

Consider, we could also add a setting to the section break to automatically add more space, then it would be more apparent reducing max system distance is the right answer, because then everything would just work right out of the box.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I wasn't considering rewriting the program for this, just solutions based upon what's currently available. Adding a section space would make sense in general, while you're (not necessarily Marc) at it make a minimum and maximum staff space also.

It doesn't matter if you make the space less or more, you're still essentially setting a fixed spacing, it's just a matter of method.

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