Music spacing
Noteman says: This topic only applies to the horizontal notation spacing. For information regarding vertical spacing between staves and systems, see Staves and Page layout.
Music spacing is automatically applied when you enter music into Finale. However, if you decide to turn off Automatic Music Spacing, the spacing is linear; in other words, a whole note gets exactly the same horizontal space as four quarter notes. Furthermore, this newly-entered music may contain collisions between lyric syllables, overlapping chord symbols, and crowded 32nd notes.
One of Finale’s most important features—and one not found in any other notation program—is its many customizable music spacing options. Finale can apply a sophisticated system of width allotments to each note of your document or scale all note durations proportionally. This feature is modeled on traditional professional music typesetting, where the engraver would consult a table of width measurements for each note value. The result is nonlinear spacing, where notes of different duration occupy only as much space as they need. Music Spacing Options have the added benefit of neatly adding additional space to each measure, as necessary, to accommodate lyrics, chord symbols, and notationally dense passages.
In Finale, the width tables used to space the music are stored in Music Spacing Libraries. Spacing tables are width measurements, one per rhythmic value. For example, in the library called Loose Spacing, a quarter note is given 1/3 inch of width and an eighth note is given 1/4 inch. By spacing your music with the aid of a Music Spacing Library, you can create extremely professional-looking scores, which are neither wider nor narrower than they need to be. See Finale Libraries for more Music Spacing Libraries.
You apply a music spacing to your music using the Music Spacing command or you can use the default Automatic Music Spacing option that applies music spacing as you enter notes or edit your music.
| Spacing |
Behavior |
Results |
| Beat Spacing |
Each beat is spaced non-linearly first, then spaced within the beat linearly. |
|
| Note Spacing |
Each note is spaced non-linearly. |
|
| Time Signature Spacing |
Each note is spaced linearly. |
|
You can edit Finale’s Music Spacing libraries so that they distribute width differently, and you can also create your own Music Spacing Libraries. Aside from the tables, you can use a scaling factor to smoothly set the relationship between the different note durations in your document:
| Scaling factor |
Results (Time Signature Spacing) |
| 2.0 |
|
| 1.618 (Fibonacci) |
|
For information regarding the relationship between music spacing the score and linked parts, see Music Spacing in linked parts.
To reapply music spacing over a region
Noteman says: When Finale spaces the notes of your document, it widens the selected measures as necessary to make room for lyrics, if any. If you choose Music Spacing in the Document Options dialog box, you’ll discover that there are other elements you can take into consideration when spacing measures: chord symbols, and accidentals, for example. Select the appropriate check boxes, and click OK.
- Choose the Selection tool
and select the music you want to respace.In general, you’ll want to select all the staves in a system. If you select only one staff, for example, you could get unexpected results, because the respacing command sets the measure widths for all staves according to the spacing of the selected region. Thus, if you select and respace measure 1 in the flute staff, which contains only a whole note, the running eighth notes in another staff’s measure 1 will be compressed and overlapping.
- Choose an option under Utilities > Music Spacing.
- If you use Apply Beat Spacing to Current Part/Score, Finale calculates where each beat should be positioned in the measure; any notes within the beat are spaced linearly (where an eighth note gets half as much space as a quarter note, and so on).
- If you use Apply Note Spacing to Current Part/Score, Finale uses the table of values to determine the exact position of each note or rest in a measure. Thus, the Note Spacing command provides more exact spacing than does the Beat Spacing command.
- Choose Utilities > Update Layout.
The Music Spacing commands are responsible for laying out the notes within each measure. In doing so, Finale adjusts the widths of the selected measures, and they may no longer fit neatly into one line of music across the page. The Update Layout command is responsible for laying out the measures across the page; it justifies the measures with the page margins. If you don’t choose Update Layout after respacing your music, you may find measures at the ends of systems in Page View that seem much too wide or too narrow.
To edit an existing music spacing library
Finale’s music spacing libraries were constructed by listing rhythmic values—from 64th note to double whole note—and assigning each a horizontal space measurement. Depending on your own tastes, you may sometimes want to alter the music spacing libraries.
- Load an existing Music Spacing library.
- Choose Document > Document Options and select Music Spacing. The Document Options - Music Spacing dialog box appears.
- Click Spacing Widths. The Spacing Widths dialog box appears.
Noteman says: Fun fact! The Spacing Widths and Duration Allotments dialog boxes are the only locations in Finale where you can use both EDUs and EVPUs.
- Select Use spacing widths table and click Widths. The Duration Allotments dialog box appears, displaying a durational value (measured in , 1024 per quarter note) in the top box and its allotted horizontal width in the bottom box.
The units of the lower box are whatever you’ve selected using Edit > Measurement Units.
- Click Select to see the closest notated equivalent of the EDU value. If you click the Prev and Next buttons, you can step through the various rhythmic values to see what horizontal space each has been assigned. Or click Duration and click the durational value whose allotment you want to change.
Remember that 512 EDUs is equivalent to an eighth note.
- Click Prev or Next until you locate the rhythmic value whose width you want to alter. Enter its new value in the bottom text box.
In the quintuplet example, you’d actually want to create a new rhythm/width pair, and insert it into the existing library.
- To create a new rhythm/width pair, enter the rhythm value (in EDUs) in the top box, and its width allotment in the bottom box and click Insert.
It might appear that you’ve typed over an existing duration/allotment pairing. But in fact, when you click Insert, you add your new pair to the library.
- Similarly, you can remove the displayed duration/allotment pairing by clicking Delete.
By selecting the other check boxes, you can specify which musical elements you want Finale to consider when calculating new measure widths: Notes and Accidentals, Articulations, Chords, Lyrics, Note-attached Expressions, Clefs, Unisons and Seconds.
- Click OK to save your settings and return to your document.
- Choose an option under Utilities > Music Spacing to apply the new allotments to your document.
To restore a region to proportional spacing
- Choose the Selection tool and select the region you want to restore.
- Choose Utilities > Music Spacing > Apply Time Signature Spacing to Current Part/Score. Finale restores the music to proportional spacing, where a whole note is allotted the same width as four quarter notes.
- Adjust the widths of the measures, if you wish (see Measures).
To fix overlapping noteheads in different layers
When notes in two Finale layers fall on the same beat but are a major second apart, Finale usually automatically offsets some of them to avoid overlapping the noteheads. However, if you’ve turned off Automatic Music Spacing, Finale won’t adjust these for you until you take the following steps.
- Choose Document > Document Options > Music Spacing. The Document Options - Music Spacing dialog box appears.
- Under Avoid Collision Of, ensure that Seconds is selected.
You can also verify that other options you want included in spacing considerations are selected.
- Click OK.
- Choose the Selection tool and select the measures you want to fix. See Selecting music for more information.
- Choose Utilities > Apply Note Spacing. Your music will be spaced to avoid collisions between seconds in different layers.
See also:
To specify minimum or maximum measure widths
