Spacing of Music Lines on the Last Page
Hello Forum:
I have a 2 page piano piece. The software has placed six lines of music on
page 1 and the remaining two on page 2.
The problem is on page 2 there is an empty space large enough for an
additional line of music in between line one and line two.
How do I close that gap?
Or direct the software to make both pages even perhaps, which is what the
music publishers seem to do most often?
Thank you for any help with this!
Brent Larimore
Comments
Read the Handbook about the Breaks and Spacers palette:
MS 3: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/breaks-and-spacers
... now known in MS 4 as the Layout palette:
MS 4: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/formatting
In particular you will need to use System Breaks (to break a system or line) and Page Breaks (to jump to a new page).
In reply to Read the Handbook about the… by DanielR
Thank you so much, Daniel! B-
In reply to Read the Handbook about the… by DanielR
Thanks again, Daniel, that was very helpful and I am learning new things.
I was able to move the two last lines of page 1 and move them to the start of page 2!
I am still wanting to experiment a little bit more and am wondering if there is an easy
way to choose how many systems you want on page 1. For example,
Is there a way for me to choose to have the first five lines on the first page
and the remaining three on page 2?
I was able to move two lines from page 1 to page 2; but have no idea how to
move a line back the other way to page 1 again.
In reply to Thanks again, Daniel, that… by brent larimore
Just delete any existing breaks and add the ones you want.
If you need further assistance, please attach your score so we can advise better.
In reply to Just delete any existing… by Marc Sabatella
Hi Marc,
Thank you so much for your help.
I have already saved it so I don't know how to delete those
at this point. I don't know how to work it backwards, if that makes
sense. I could take my fourth line on page 1 and move it to page 2 now,
but I don't know how to take line one from page 2 and move it backwards
to page 1....that's my issue.
If I need to "delete a break" to do that I don't understand how to do that.
It doesn't look bad now, but there is a bit of space in between each system. I was
hoping to try putting five systems on page 1 and seeing if it would align the same
space between the three systems on page 2 and end it with page2 being roughly a half page.
I guess I will go ahead and attach the score if that might help, as you suggested.
Thanks again!
In reply to Hi Marc, Thank you so much… by brent larimore
Normally a professional editor would try to balance the pages to make them all equally full, not to try to force more music onto one and leave another half-empty. The exception would be if that make a page turn easier. But also, there is no special reason to require the spacing between the systems to be the same from page to page - it's more important that each page look good on its own.
As it is, I think this file looks fine as is. But let's talk about what's possible anyhow.
First, I don't get what you mean about moving the fourth line from page 1 to page 2 and also a line from page 2 backwards. That seems mutually exclusive. So I'll assume you really meant, two totally different unrelated things you want to try.
To move the last system of page one to page 2, simply delete the existing page break, and add a new one to bar 13. To delete the break, just click it and press Delete, same as you'd delete anything else.
To move the first system of page 2 back to page one, simply delete the existing page break and add a new one
Neither looks very professional, but not because the spacing is inconsistent - it's because the pages aren't well balanced this way. Even if you added a spacer to the bottom of one page to force all the extra space to the bottom instead of nicely distributed (which could look rather worse), it's still unbalanced.
Realistically, if I wanted to improve this, I'd consider creating more systems so instead of 4+4, you have 5+5. For instance, you could add breaks within each page so you have only 3-4 measures per system on average instead of 4-5, thus distributing the measures evenly throughout each page. I'm not convinced it's better, but at least it's not a step backwards like having 5+3 or 3+5 systems would be.