Manually adjusting position of staves?
I'm new to MuseScore (but not new to scorewriters) and I'm experimenting if MuseScore can fit my engraving needs. I have a score for choir and started with basic notes and lyrics, then did some rough overall layout shifting to see how MuseScore reacts. Now when I add some more notational details I see layout problems arising as shown in the attached excerpt:
This is the situation after I added the accents to the leftmost notes. With the accents the automatic layout mechanism moved the second and third staff downward to make more room for the accents. But the automatically generated space is too large. (Compare the position of the situation before adding the accents, which was similar to the positions of the staves you can see at the right of the excerpt.) I did not find a way to reduce this gap, either by adjusting a parameter or by manually moving some item.
My questions are
1. Is this large gap expected behaviour? Is it parameterized so that I can change it? (And which parameter would it be?)
2. (and more important, because it is a more general question): Can I adjust the position of the staves manually? And how would I do that? (I would have expected to be able to "select" the staff within this system somehow and then be able to drag it or change the position numerically.)
For reference: this is MuseScore 3.0.5. (And no, it is not my normal workflow to constantly fiddle with the layout; I'm doing it just to quickly learn how MuseScore reacts.)
Best regards
Lutz
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Comments
Hello, and welcome! FYI, it's generally easier to help if you attach actual scores, not just pictures. As it is, it's hard to know what things you might have adjusted away from the defaults. But the setting for the space between lyrics is Format / Style / Lyrics / Min. bottom margin. It defaults to 2 sp ("sp" being "staff space", the basic unit of measure in most notation programs).
In general, as you say, you should not need be fiddling with staff distances manually all that often, as there are settings like that, or Format / Style / Page / Staff distance, or Format / Style / Score / Min. vertical distance, or (right-click) Staff Properties / Extra distance above staff, that when set to your liking will make most such manual adjustments unnecessary. But, that said, see the Breaks & Spacers palette for further controls over staff distances.
And BTW, you will want to update to 3.2, aside from significant bug fixes, it has much more flexible handling of automatic placement.
The answers are far better if you upgrade to version 3.2 that was released today. It fixed some major bugs in 3.1 that introduced a lot of features that fixes your layout issues.
First, download 3.2 and use that on the score. If you still have questions about bad results, attach the score so we can see what you have done. There are some automated things you might do and some manual things depending on what else you have done.
Thank you Marc and mike for your prompt answers.
Yes, "Lyrics / Min. bottom margin" seems to be the culprit here, unfortunately it doesn't distinguish between the amount of material following below the lyrics, so changing it will make the distance in other parts of the score too small...
Before exploring other style settings I will follow your recommentation to upgrade to 3.2 and see what has changed there. Again thanks a lot.
- Lutz
In reply to Thank you Marc and mike for… by layernull
Go straight to 3.2.1. It was released today to fix some bad bugs in version 3.2.
In reply to Thank you Marc and mike for… by layernull
If you wish to have uneven spacing, you can, just set the min distance to the minimum you want then add spacers where you want more.