lateral spaces can't be removed

• Nov 30, 2020 - 12:14

Hi all, I've been trying to play on multiple settings for a very long time to try to delete some unwanted spaces between a note and the bar following it. I have circled in red those spaces . I have already trying playing on :
- "style" stettings
- "page settings"
- "stretching" parameters

Thanks for your help and sorry for my english


Comments

Those spaces are not "unwanted" (except by you that is :-) ). In standard notation, the notes are placed within the bar so that their position indicates which beat they start on. There is only a single dotted minim (1/2 note for US users) in the bar and it is correctly placed at the start of the bar to indicate it starts on beat 1. The rest of the bar is space that represents beats two and three. As you only have two bars per system, they do look rather bare. You might get something more pleasing to the eye by fitting more than two bars on a system. There are many adjustments you could use to achieve this. First ensure that there are no system breaks (I don't see any in your picture). Try reducing the stretch using keyboard short cut "{", or try reducing the score scaling [Format]>[Page Settings>[Stave space].

For more assistance attach the score so that we can see what the current settings are.

In reply to by SteveBlower

Hi Steve, thanks for your answer, I don't know a lot about music theory that's why I didn't know about these "beat display rules".

I have tried already to play with reducing stretch settings and reducing the score scaling .

Anyway, I will to use it to try to have an acceptable display !

Thank you

In reply to by paulmkmaurice

From a picture it's impossible to know with certainty if you have system breaks forcing only two measures per system since you can hide them. If there are system breaks you will never get more measures on a system (a single line of music) and the measures will always spread out to fill the system.

If you do not have system breaks, then reducing the scaling will at some point put more measures on a system and reduce some of the white space you don't like. You can also open Format->Style->Measure and reduce the measure minimum width, but I don't think this is really your issue since the default is 5 spaces and your measures look to be more than 5 spaces wide already.

I believe the biggest problem with your score is that you have it set up so there are two measures on a system. If you attach the score someone can look at how to fit more measures on a system to reduce the excess white space.

One final point, a note that has a duration that lasts the entire measure will always be left justified (for lack of a better term) and the white space will be at the end of the measure. This is what most publishers practice in layout and have for a couple of centuries.

In reply to by paulmkmaurice

It seems you have a printer attached to your computer with a very narrow paper and MuseScore is detecting this and setting the width of the paper on your system and formatting your systems to match this paper size. When I opened the score, this is what I saw:

Douce nuit pic.PNG

As you can see, mine is quite different. I was correct that the measure width had been changed in Format->Style as I previously mentioned. The min width is 17 rather than the default 5.

I believe fixing these things will make your score more to your liking.

In reply to by SteveBlower

There seem to be a few problems in bars 15, 16 and 17. If you look at the right hand end of those bars you will see a small grey "-". This indicates that there are fewer beats in the bar than are indicated by the time signature. Sometimes this is what you want. However, not in this case. I suspect that you have mistakenly ctrl+deleted notes. This deletes notes from the bar and the time they take up. Just a simple delete will replace the note with an equivalent length of silence - i.e. a rest. Another possibility is that you selected "insert mode" for note entry rather than the default "step time". Insert mode allows you to insert extra time into a measure. Step time mode ensures that the bars remain the length specified in the time signature, no matter what notes you try to put in them and this usually the most useful method to enter notes.

All is not lost though. If you right click on a blank space in the bar and select bar properties from the menu you will see that the nominal and actual bar durations do not match. If you set the actual duration to the same as the nominal duration each bar will then have the expected 3 beats and you can overwrite the mis-timed notes with the correct ones.

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