Can I control the space scaling between notes of different durations?
Eighth notes are spaced a little closer together than quarters, which are a little closer than halves, etc. I gather from searching the forum that this is proper music typography.
Is there a way to control how much of a difference the note length makes to the note spacing? e.g. can I globally make eighth notes (or anything with beams, really) pack closer together than they normally are, relative to longer notes?
Comments
Sort of. Try experimenting with different settings for "Spacing" and "Minimum note distance" in Format / Style / Measure. No guarantees you'll be able to get the specific experimental / non-standard effect you are looking for, but if you post a picture, maybe someone can advise better.
In reply to Sort of. Try experimenting… by Marc Sabatella
I tried those before I posted, without luck.
I don't think I can make it work. Context: I transcribed a bunch of stuff from a music book into Musescore so that I could modify it, and I was trying to make them "look like" the originals (to make it easier to spot transcription errors). It turns out the reason the original beamed notes were packed closer is that it uses equal-size measures in each system -- so no extra stretch for a bunch of beamed notes. And I know from digging through the forums that equal measure sizes aren't something MS supports.
So I'm probably out of luck. Not a huge deal, though.
I'm curious: to what extent are note spacing and measure stretch standardized? I know that it's standard for longer notes to get more space, and (I think?) for measures with more notes to get more space, but is there a standard for how much more space?
if not, I guess consider this a feature request for the ability to tweak those things.
(and while I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, it seems that a dotted eighth note beamed to a sixteenth note spreads out much wider than two beamed eighth notes for some reason)
In reply to I tried those before I… by ajv (padding)
While there is no direct support for equal width measures, if that is your goal, it's much better to just use measure stretch rather than tweaking distances between notes individually.
As for standardization, there isn't really one definitive rule, but different authors give different advice. We generally rely most on Elaine Gould's "Behind Bars" as our go-to reference on matters like this, FWIW, but I think she gives a precise mathematical rule.
As for dotted notes, room is allocated for the dot, so it's normal they take more space. Maybe it shouldn't be quite as much, but this is all subjective.