forcing a measure length 'contraction'
hey folks
ive noticed that some measures are 'stretched' much further than their # of notes and rests would normally indicate; sometimes i can contract these using the cntl bracket keys, but sometimes - especially if the leading and trailing measures "are* very long - that i cant
i tried fiddling with 'measure stretch' - under measure properties - by going down from 1.0 to .5 - but no effect.
is there a way to force the program to 'shrink' the measures so i can bunch them closer together? sometimes if i 'add' a new measure before the measure i want to shrink it will reformat and make it smaller - but then i need to have a new measure of music. if i delete the new measure, it just snaps back.
thanks
Comments
You can't go below a certain stretch, after that you can only use wider paper, narrower borders, tweak about a million other options or an overall smaller space setting, I'd go for the latter, Format > Page settings > Scaling > Staff space (sp)
In reply to You can't below a certain… by Jojo-Schmitz
ok - how then can i force it closer - for intance, here is an example of the issue:
1> create a run of sixty fourth notes. the program auto stretches the measure to take the full width of the page.
2> I continue to write, now i have about 20 measures.
3> i go back to my original measure and decide i want 8th notes instead of 16th's. However, the program wont 'fix' the stretch it created before, and when I click CNTL bracket it wont move.
no way to force a reformat?
In reply to ok - how then can i force it… by ptrtool1999
You can't go closer, from certain point on, that's what I said. There's a limit to what you can put into a single line, depending on a whole bunch of settings. For all the details see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/layout-and-formatting
You can reset the stretch back to its default though, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/layout-and-formatting#increase-decrea…
In reply to You can't go closer, from… by Jojo-Schmitz
ok thanks, will read that section
In reply to ok - how then can i force it… by ptrtool1999
I think your understanding of what is happening is off. Unless you explicitly stretched that original measure, no additional stretch was applied. It's stretch to fill the system, sure, but that it's an internal and dynamically-calculated stretch value, recalculated on every layout. The regular stretch value is still 1.0, you can verify that Measure Properties. The only reason why the next measure doesn't jump up to join it on the first system is that it presumably still contains 64th notes and hence doesn't fit.
If you still have difficulty, please attach your score (or a relevant excerpt) and we can explain better using the actual specific example.
Bottom line: MuseScore will fit as many measures as it can without literally overlapping the notes, given your current settings for things like staff size, etc. If it won't fit more measure on a line, that's because it's physically impossible, like the math literally won't add up.
In reply to I think your understanding… by Marc Sabatella
ok - i will try to find an example where i have a 'before' stretch, an 'after' stretch, and then the final setting where i revert the measure to all 8th notes - and the following and preceing measures also have 8th''s - but the program wont resize back.
In addition to the above, make sure you don't have any system breaks that force the following measures to the next system if your goal is to fit more of them on the current system.
And if the goal is narrower on some systems, not all (thus not page margins) consider adding horizontal frames in places where you wish to compact those measures.