How to work on a big score

• Oct 11, 2019 - 22:33

Hi,

what is your advice on creating a 'big' score with several mouvements?
Sections or separate files per mouvement?

Thanks for any advice.

Regards


Comments

My experience is it's better to create for each movement a separate file. The advantage is that's there isn't no slowness in playback/processing during the creation of large scores. The disadvantage is, that the album manager feature is disabled in MS 3.x at time (which was implemented in MS 2.x).

I would add to this:

Separate movements also just simplify navigation and overall management of the music. The main downside is that without the album feature you can't recombine them. And the only real drawback of that is, you won't be able to have a movement end mid-page and the next movement continue on the same page. But I'd suggest, you probably don't want to do that for a "big" score anyhow - better to plan the layout so the movements all start a new page.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

To add to Marc's comments, it is normal to have all instruments to be shown on the first page of a movement because it is common to change instrumentation from one movement to the next. This makes it normal to put the first system of a movement on it's own page and adjust spacing as necessary to make this happen. The following pages of the conductor's score have various instruments listed that indicate who is playing, or simply used to fill space to avoid pages that are only partly filled.

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