Measure rests

Full measure rest

A whole rest, centered within a measure (shown below), is used to indicate that an entire measure (or a voice within a measure) is silent, regardless of time signature.

To create one or more full measure rests

Use the following method if all selected measures are "standard"—i.e. with no custom durations:

1 Select a measure, or range of measures.
2. Press Del (Mac: Backspace).

If one or more of the measures contains a custom duration, use the following method instead:

1. Select a measure, or range of measures.
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del (Mac: Cmd+Shift+Backspace).

To create a full measure rest in a particular voice

1. In the appropriate voice, enter a rest that extends for the full measure.
2. Make sure the rest is selected, then press Ctrl+Shift+Del (Mac: Cmd+Shift+Backspace).

If the voice contains only rests you can select the first rest and invoke the conversion keystroke.

Multimeasure rest

A Multimeasure rest indicates a period of silence for an instrument: the number of measures is shown by the number above the staff.

Multimeasure rests are automatically interrupted at important points, such as double barlines, rehearsal marks, key- or time signature changes, section breaks etc. and also at measures that are set to break multimeasure rests.

To display multimeasure rests

To turn multimeasure rests on or off:

• Press M on your keyboard.

Alternatively:

1. From the menu, choose Format→Style….
2. Click on the "Score" tab, if it is not already selected;
3. Tick/untick "Create multimeasure rests". Here you can also set the minimum of empty measures to combine into a multimeasure rest (see also Layout and formatting: Score).

Note: It is recommended that you enter all notes in the score first before enabling multimeasure rests.

Break multimeasure rest

You may want to have a multimeasure rest divided into two multimeasure rests:

1. Ensure that the option to display multimeasure rests in the score is off (see above).
2. Right-click on the measure where you want the second multimeasure rest to start;
3. From the menu, choose Measure Properties and tick "Break multimeasure rest."
4. Enable multimeasure rests again

See also: Measure operations: Break multimeasure rest.