In need of help formatting an a cappella arrangement
Hi Musescorians,
I am an avid a cappella arranger and I have had quite a bit of experience with Musescore. I am very comfortable using all of the features up until the layout and formatting. I have referred to other forum questions, tutorials, plug-ins, and all there is to know on formatting. I have played many games of guess-and-check with the formatting options which tends to lead me to a bigger mess than what I started with.
So I turn to you! Attached is the musescore file with my arrangement on there. I am hoping someone can take the time to download and solve this issue for me or at least take a look at it. This will surely help with my future arranging endeavors and save a head ache or two.
I would simply like for my arrangement to look more aesthetically pleasing to the eye of a singer. Right now, the bars in the beginning do only two measures per line. I would like for there to be 4 measures per line. (yes I have tried Style---General Style---System---Fix number of measures/system and I have also tried the Break every x measures plugin, and I have also tried the breaks and spacers individually from the palette.
1. as close to 4 measures per line as possible please
2. Page two has a funky spacing issue that I believe might be affecting the rest of the piece.
3. I'm trying to reduce the numbers of pages to as low as possible without compromising the ease of reading for the singers. Ideally, I'd like to have two systems per page, with each system having four measures.
Please feel free to email me with any questions, comments, or you can simply reply to this. Thank you so much in advance for your help! Dog Days Are Over Notation File.mscz
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Dog Days Are Over Notation File.mscz | 32.24 KB |
Comments
I changed Scaling (1.764);
Removed the spacers and added page breaks.
I deleted a lot of TempoText (and some wandering notes);
Not a big gain. consider that the lyrics claim their tribute (without them: 6 pages).
In reply to I made a few attempts: by Shoichi
Thank you so much for taking the time to do that! It really means a lot and wow, what a fast response!
Is there by chance a template I should use when writing for a cappella music on Musescore? I know that not every score will have four parts and a soloist, but I'd like to at least have an idea or template to go off of when creating future arrangements. Should I always stick to the 1.7 scaling?
Any other recommendations for layout? Should I wait until the very end like recommended or should I work the layout as I am going in my case?
Thanks so much again!
Don't use the "Fix number of measures/system" option unless your music is very simple and you know it will all fit. Otherwise, it just tries to cram more than will fit.
Breaks - whether added manually or via plugin - can only *decrease* the number of measures per line. If you want *more* measures per line, you'll have to either shrink the overall size of the notation or reduce the "stretch" of the measures you want to fit. See Layout and formatting .
In reply to Don't use the "Fix number of by Marc Sabatella
Thank you for the great advice as well as the great link to the Layout and formatting.