Adjust distance per note length

• Jan 25, 2017 - 10:16

When I create songs in Musescore I always find it annoying that there is a bigger distance between notes that last longer, compared to the shorter notes. This causes the lyrics underneath to be spread unevenly. Is there a way in which I can adjust these standard distances between notes, so that I don't have to correct note/lyrics positions individually?


Comments

I suspect you are writing a song with a voice part and an instrument part and the rhythms don't line up. Like this simple selection.

notes.png

You will notice some inconsistency in the spacing. That is standard for the note on beat 2 to line up in the same measure up and down the score. But you may already know that. If you want to override this, you can select notes and in the inspector (F8) move the chord (not the segment) left or right as you need. You can use positive or negative numbers and if you don't like what you did, the black arrow will allow you to reset it to 0. You can type just numbers (sp is automatically supplied) or use the arrows as you like.

Hmm, it's pretty much universally standard in music notation for longer notes to take more space than shorter ones - in fact every single guide I know says you must honor this. It's an important visual aid to reading the rhythm. So unless you have some extremely unusual special reason to violate this rule, my advise is, don't. That said, if you don't mind your notation being incorrect and are not worried about reading errors that will likely result, adjusting things manually is the way to go I guess., You can try playing with the settings in "Style / General / Measure" to see if some combination of spacing & minimum note distance will give you the results you want.

feel free to attach a score and describe more fully the non-standard result you are trying to achieve, and maybe someone can help.

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