Cue note formatting

• Mar 6, 2018 - 04:33

I frequently work with orchestral parts with an abundance of cue notes. The formal method of showing cue notes is to show them along with full-sized rests for the primary instrument in the same measure. When I do this, the cue notes will not compress enough with the "{" shortcut. It is very important to me to be able to shrink measures in order to maintain reasonable page turns.

I will note that removing the full-sized rests from the 2nd voice makes the spacing much more as expected, but I do not want to have to remove the rests as they help to clarify that the cue notes are informative only.

Is there a way to compress measures more than is possible by default? (like maybe an override safety minimum width)

Also, unless I am doing something wrong, the stem lengths do not shrink when setting notes to small for cue notes. They do not shrink 'enough' when I set the chord to small. It gets frustrating having to manually drag each stem or beam after they are shrunk.

Attachment Size
.Cue Note Sample.mscz, 11.01 KB

Comments

Sorry about attaching the backup file. I was not enough attention to the dot. The correct file is attached here.

For the record, I am running Version 2.1.0, revision 871c8ce. I am a long-time user of Smartscore pro and Finale. MuseScore has made a real difference in ease of use in the few weeks I have been using it.

In reply to by Fiddlin Farmer

If reducing stretch won't compress a measure further, generally this means you are running up against your setting in Style / General / Measure Minimum note distance. But that's actually not what is going on here. As noted, here your problem really has more to do with the dotted half rest, which needs to fit between the two quarter notes in the other voice. Converting to a full measure rest solves the problem as noted, and is more musically correct according to standard engraving practice anyhow. I'm not sure why this doesn't allow the measure to be compressed more, though. Theoretically, it should have no effect on measure spacing at all, and yet removing the rest does allow the measure to shrink further. I guess a workaround if you want the measure smaller still is to skip the measure rest and instead place a facsimile using the Symbols palette (press "Z" to display).

Thank you Marc and Jojo. The combination of your suggestions helped wonderfully. I am still working past the initial learning curve, but I am very impressed at how well everything works and how much more quickly and accurately I can enter music than anything else I have used.

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