Note spacing
Music spacing is automatically applied
when you enter music into SongWriter. However, if you decide to turn off
Automatic
Music Spacing in the Edit Menu, the spacing will be 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 SongWriter’s most important features
is its Apply Music Spacing command. Once you’ve entered your music into
the score, SongWriter can apply a sophisticated system of width allotments
to each note of your score. 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. The
Apply Music Spacing command has the added benefit of neatly adding additional
space to each measure, as necessary, to accommodate lyrics, chord symbols,
and “notey” passages.
- Click
the Selection tool
.
- Select
the music you want to respace. In general, you’ll want to choose
Select All from the Edit Menu, so that all staves are highlighted. 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
Apply Music Spacing from the Utilities Menu. The final step is
extremely important:
- Choose
Update Layout from the Edit Menu. The Apply Music Spacing commands
are responsible for laying out the notes within each measure. In doing
so, SongWriter 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. Choosing Update
Layout will solve the problem immediately.
