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Measures and staves (2)

Subjects covered:

• How to move a staff?
• How to modify the width of a measure?

Watch also the following video:

• Measures, staves and pages - Organizing the score (10'10) - Flash - Quicktime

How to move a staff? [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist]

In this lesson, we will learn how to modify the layout of measures and staves.

In order to work on a practical example, open the Ex046 example document. It is displayed as follows:

Remark: Pizzicato Soloist only enables one staff. The above example will be open in a demonstration mode to follow the example. You may come back to the Soloist mode in the Options menu, Working mode item.

Open the main palette and select the measures tool .

If you wish to have more space between both staves (to add lyrics for example), place the mouse cursor in the middle of a measure in the lower staff, click while keeping the mouse button down and go gradually downwards. A rectangle follows your movement. By releasing the mouse button, the lower staff is redrawn lower (the upper staff has not moved) :

Let us see now what happens if there is more than 2 staves. Double-click on measure 1 on the lower staff. Fill in the dialog box so as to add 0 measure and 2 staves and click OK. The result is now:

Now move the second staff upwards, so as to reduce the space which separates it from the first. Again, a rectangle follows your movement, but this time the rectangle includes the three lower staves. By releasing the mouse, you get the following result:

The rule is that when you move a staff, you move all the lower staves at the same time .

Exercise yourself to handle staves:

• Add 2 staves below the clarinet.
• Move all the staves so as to double the space between each staff. If your screen does not allow to see them all together, use the vertical scroll bar to move or zoom out to see all staves.
• Again move all the staves, this time by moving them close together.
• By calling the measures and staves dialog box on the second measure of the second staff, delete 3 measures and 5 staves.
• Come back in 100 % zoom value.

How to modify the width of a measure? [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist]

By following the above example, the score is now displayed as follows:

Imagine that you wish to widen this measure. There is a very easy way to do it. Place the mouse cursor in the area located just before the end of the measure:

and click while keeping the mouse button down. Then drag the mouse to the right and a rectangle follows your movement. By releasing the mouse button, the measure is redrawn with the expected size:

To shorten a measure, do the same operation by dragging to the left. Shorten the measure to obtain:

Notice that Pizzicato has automatically moved the notes at equal distances in the measure. You can avoid that by executing the same operation while holding the Ctrl key down. You get for example:

When you work in linear mode (this is also valid in global mode), there are three ways to adjust the width of several measures.

• Before releasing the mouse button, when you drag the right part of a measure to modify its width, hold down the CTRL key. When you release the mouse, all measures are resized with the same width.

• Similarly, by using both CTRL and SHIFT, the current measure and the following measures are resized with the same width. The measures before are not modified.

• When you use only the SHIFT key, all measures are resized in the same proportion as the current measure. This may be used to resize all the measures of a score in a similar way.

Exercises

Close Pizzicato and restart it. Open the Ex046 example again. Decrease the width of measure 4 by half. Notice that the measure located below it also resizes. For an orchestra score with for example 16 superimposed staves, all 16 staves are resized together.

Open the Ex047 example. By using what you learned here, correct the layout of measures and staves to get:

Beginner

Professional

Notation

Composition Light

Composition Pro

Drums and Percussion

Guitar

Choir

Keyboard

Soloist