Formatting Question - Staff Distance

• Jul 4, 2021 - 22:56

I think this is the first time I've had this issue. The chord symbols between the Staff and Grand Staff are coinciding with the lyrics. See attached.

I'm having trouble understanding the options. The Style is set to 'Disable vertical justification'. If I increase the Staff Distance eventually the lyrics and chords move away from each other. What I'm wondering is, why doesn't the software recognize the presence of both lyrics and chords and space appropriately, automatically? The Style settings only provide enough space when Lyrics and Chords directly coincide with each other.

I changed the setting to 'Enable vertical justification of staves' but I'm having a lot of trouble trying to increase the spacing to allow for the chords without somehow having huge spaces between systems. I'm obviously very new at this. I appreciate whatever guidance you can provide. Thanks!

I uploaded the file for reference.

Thanks.

Attachment Size
Capture.PNG 25.31 KB
sm-Draw_Me_Close-Bb.mscz 38.36 KB

Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I think the fixed distance would be for symmetry, whitespace, balance in what you're looking at. In my opinion, if the spacing, number of staves, etc. changes from page to page it would be distracting to the reader.

What was suggested was to fix the spacing on the lines where it's needed. What I'm wondering is how to set the minimum distance for the whole score. I tried that but then somehow the formatting in other areas expanded such that there were only two "lines" of music on a page. I need to practice with the min/max spacing settings I guess. I was doing something wrong.

MuseScore does space things out to avoid collisions between the lyrics themselves and the chords. What it doesn't do is have the additional smarts to recognize issues that are not outright collisions but just visual confusion, like if a chord symbol on one staff appears next to the lyric on another. It also doesn't recognize the lyric extenders (underscores used to indicate melisma or tied notes) and thus can cause outright collisions there. We tried to fix that but couldn't find a good way.

The biggest thing you could do to help this score is to move the chords to where they normally belong - above the top staff. Check published sheet music and you'll see it is almost invariably done that way, as it normally yields the most compact / least visually confusing arrangements. So, try selecting all chord symbols (right-click one, Select / All Similar Elements), Ctrl+X to cut, then click the rest in the first measure of the top staff, Ctrl+V to paste. Instant improvement.

BTW, your score is not currently set to disable vertical justification, and that's a good thing. Disabling vertical justification would be a mistake, it would preventing MuseScore from adding the space it would normally need to add to balance out your pages and in many cases also prevent exactly the sort of issue you are seeing here. For instance, vertical justification would allow MuseScore to automatically spread the staves and systems out more if you added page breaks to have only three systems per page.

BTW, another way to avoid the visual confusion and occasional collision with lyric extenders would be to right-click the top piano staff (the one with the chord symbols), Staff/Part Properties, and increase the "Extra distance above staff" to allow room for the chord symbols to not interfere with anything else. or go around manually adding spacers, but that would extremely tedious and "fragile", likely to produce wrong results if the page layout ever changes in any way that affects which measures are on which systems.

But again, none of that is needed here once you move the chord symbols where they belong.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Marc, in general, thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my (and others, of course) posts in the forum. I've never witnessed this level of support for PAID software, much less something free.

That being said, the chord placement is due to my dear friend, the aged piano player in the group for whom I am creating these scores. She needs the chord symbols next to what she's playing, rather than the vocal line. But I agree with what you're saying 100%. Thank you so much for your help!

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