Notation Element Scaling and Sizing

• Mar 6, 2022 - 20:08

Hey there!
I was editing a score of mine that uses clusters, so I looked for a notehead for that. Fortunately, cluster notation was present. However, I was unable to extend the lines coming from the noteheads as well as unable to extend the "connector" piece between the noteheads. This made it so I had to lump a bunch of tiny connector bits in between which is a bit tedious, and it ended up looking quite sloppy. Of course, I'm no artist.
Is there a way to scale/extend elements (like you can with arpeggios, pedal lines, etc. with those pink dashed lines, or those squares that allow me to drag the element to the desired size) that I pull from the master palette?

Edit:
Here's what I wanted the clusters to look like: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT5WcifWD4ptyyOoyN…

Also, I brought another element from the master palette: the Sostenuto pedal mark. It is significantly larger than the regular Ped mark. I want them to be about the same size.

I've already looked at the inspector while the element is placed in the score. Nothing. I've right clicked the element in it's sidebar palette, gone to "properties", and then played with the scaling function there, but that only scaled down the element icon in the palette.

Am I missing something? Can you help, please?
Thank you so so much!!

Attachment Size
Roid Rage_An Exercise in Pretension.mscz 41.89 KB

Comments

Please attach a sample score (mscz) file which makes support a lot easier on our end. Perhaps also attach an example of how you need your cluster to look like in the end?

Symbols from the master palette are fixed size. They are the size as intended by the musical font creator and thus should be (generally speaking) the correct size in relation to all other musical symbols.
If you need a way for them to be scalable, add the symbols to a text type element instead (such as a staff text, or in the case of a Sost likely as line start text) which'll allow you to set the fontsize for the text element and as such scale the symbol.

In reply to by Rie-san

You can attach images directly on this forum (just like you attached your score). So this is the notation you're looking for:
330125-cluster-example.png

Thankfully, that's a lot of the same cluster in your score, so making it work is not too difficult. The first step is to remove the current symbols:

  1. Select that range of cluster (m1 -18)
  2. Right-click (ctrl-click on mac) one of the symbols and select all similar elements in range
  3. Delete

The trick I've used is to use the stem of the chord to make those vertical lines. To get two stems per chord (one "real" one for the "cluster") I moved the bottom note of each chord to voice 3. This is a trivial action with the help of the Chord Level Selector plugin.

To aid in the further selection process, I've started by selecting the very first voice 3 note and then used the inspector (buttons at the bottom) to switch the selection to the stem of this note. Again using the inspector I gave it a negative X-offset of 4sp, making it float to the left in emptiness; which in turn will make it easy to select without clicking on other stuff (clusters are crowded ;-))

The main trick now is the selection method, which goes as follows:

  1. Select the range
  2. Right-click an element of the wanted type within the range to select all similar elements within range
    The result is now a selection of that element type, limited in range, but including both voices (1 and 3)
  3. Right-click the element in the voice to exclude for this action (this is where the displaced stem/flag for that first chord comes in handy) and use "Select → More" to excluded same voiced elements from the current selection.

Using that selection method you can now:

  • Shorten and reposition (Y-offset) all voice1 beams to only start from the top note
  • Hide all voice 3 flags (turn invisible)
  • Shorten, thicken and reposition (X-offset) all voice 3 beams to become the cluster indication

And finally you can turn all voice 3 rests for those measures invisible, which'll make the voice 1 rests snap back into place as well.

Example attached.

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