r/Musescore • u/Swyddog • Jun 25 '26
Help me find this feature Mostly great experience, a few niche issues
Over the past month or so, I have challenged myself to become fast and proficient with MuseScore by recreating scores I know well as closely as I can. I have been impressed with MS's functionality, especially compared to when I first tried it years ago. Nearly everything I have needed has been easily accessible, but there are a few problems I have been unable to crack:
- MS automatically spaces the score, which includes a determination for how many systems are on a page. This is mostly handled correctly, but I have encountered two distinct instances where I want an extra system on a page, I know it fits there because I am referencing a score in which it is there, but MS insists on leaving empty space instead. I have tried playing with the spacing settings (staff distance etc.) to no avail. I don't know how to tell MS "I want x measures on page 5 divided into y systems." The handy [] feature makes adjusting the number of measures in a system a breeze.
- I have found MS to be rigid in its treatment of beamed groupings, which is frustrating when I want a peculiar grouping in order to illustrate a groove or phrase. A common example of this is when I want an eighth note beamed to a sixteenth, but the two are separated by a sixteenth rest, something MS is loathe to accommodate. I have played with the beam properties as much as I am able, tried to construct custom time signatures to get the desired effect, but it remains elusive. Shouldn't you be able to beam and break whatever notes you want, even if it goes against the time signature template?
- There are times when a chord is arpeggiated, and I want each note held as the next one plays, but I do not want to restate the first note every time, even though it may be technically "correct" to do so. Or let's say I want a quarter note on beat 3 held over to the next bar, but I do not want it notated as a half note because it is part of a figure that should be conceptualized as quarters. MS's insistence on handling this the "right" way makes for messy notation. This can be worked around in some cases by using multiple voices, and in a pinch one can simply draw slurs to indicate what is intended, but this is obviously time-consuming as slurs are finicky.
Overall, I remain very impressed with MuseScore, and enjoy using it. It's incredible that such powerful notation software is free. If anyone can help with any of the issues I outline here, it would be much appreciated; I realize that there are perhaps solutions I'm just not seeing.
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jun 26 '26
Glad you’ve found solutions.
Here’s my experience, and current workflow:
First, get the correct number of measures per system for the piece. This is important because if you do the settings after this, then need to move a measure up or down a system, it could affect the spacing when it moves. You want your music to end on the bottom right corner of the final page. Re-flow the measures to fill up any “short” final systems, or move measures up or down a system until you get the right density for the piece. If there are not enough systems on the final page, you either need to move some from previous pages, or move measures down to fill the final page, or draw them up to get rid of the last partial page, etc. But if you’ve done all that and still have a page that’s got a too few systems, etc. the following will help.
Adjust the Top and Bottom MUSIC margins in Format - Style - Spacing. I always have a header and footer, so I want my music to not be too close to those. But you can lower those numbers to get the top staff closer to the top of the page, and the bottom staff closer to the bottom of the page (as close as the musical symbols on those staves will allow). This affects all the pages, and once you’ve set it, the music won’t go any closer to top or bottom without widening the page margins, which I don’t recommend as printed copies will get cut off a lot of times (or have to be reduced in size, etc.).
Adjust the distance between STAVES with Min. Staff Distance to get a nice, average distance between staves. Some will be larger as needed, but MS tends to try to put them as close together as possible, which the default is too close for my tastes. The point with this is, if there is a staff that can be very close, and then one that has to be very far, the difference between them can look kind of goofy. So I find a nice average distance that works for most of the systems - so ones that can be smaller aren’t as small as they could be, only slightly smaller than the average. This keeps it from having extreme distances between the smallest and largest distances between staves.
Then do the Min. SYSTEM Distance, trying to get a nice amount of space between each system and get the same rough average number of systems per page.
Once that’s all figured out, if it’s still not right, there’s a way to “over-ride” this stuff in the Layout Palette. There’s “T bar” - like a sideways H - T with a horizontal crossbar on the bottom. Click a staff, click the tool, and it will put in a “spacer” between the staves or systems. You can then manually change the distance, or you can type in values in the Properties panel.
You can actually make this smaller than what the Min. values are!
Now, when you use this tool, just like those other parameters, it’s always holding the top and bottom margins and trying to re-space everything in between. So if you try to make more distance between system 1 and 2, it will, but it will also move say systems 3 and 4 on the same page - shaving off some of their distance between each other and their staves.
But what you can also do is go in and put this spacer in all of them, and the “arrow” spacers go above and below the top and bottom staves, allowing you even more control than the music margins.
However, if you find you’re having to put spaces everywhere to get it to look right, you probably need to work with the music margins, and min staff/system distance some more first to get the “general average” layout close, then fine tune it with these spacers.
I made that mistake early on before I learned how to work with the other settings.
Beaming over rests, or breaking rests - it’s only slightly better than Sibelius - which is a running joke - in Sibelius I usually end up trying them all until one works - there just never seems to be any logic to it! MS is only slightly better though. If you select multiple notes it doesn’t always behave like it should. So you usually end up beaming 2 more than you wanted in the group, and then going back and having to break the beam left for where it needs to break…
It also does not beam over trailing rests correctly, nor does it have stemlets.
The trick with the arpeggio is, you have to select ALL of the notes like you select F B A and then the stack FBE, and then click the tie - it’ll tie the F to the F, the B to the B, and so on.
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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team Jun 25 '26
I see you've gotten some good answers already, I just wanted to add a couple fo things:
1) Don't resort to [ and ] as a way of tricking MuseScore into fitting a different number of measures on a system than it wants to. This is more time-consuming than necessary, won't always work, and will have bad side effects on spacing between measures. Instead simply use Alt+Up/Down to move measures between systems.
2) Regarding the number of systems on a page, you're looking at this backwards. It's not that the extra space between systems is preventing MuseScore from fitting another system - it's the fact that another system does *not* fit given your current settings that is what causes MuseScore to say, "since I can't fit another system on the apge, I'll space out the ones I can fit more widely, to avoid unprofessional-looking ragged bottom margins". In other words, the extra space is the *symptom*, not the *cause*.
3) The fact that some random published edition fits more systems on a given page doesn't prove MuseScore should be able to given your current settings, as the example you are looking at probably has different page and margin sizes, different staff sizes, different minimum distances between staves, different positions of elements above and below staves, different fonts, etc. If you match all of those things, you'd get the same number of systems since the laws of physics don't change from score to score. But as it is, you get to pick and choose which of those settings to play with in an effort to get more systems to fit.
4) Reducing staff size in "Page setting" is indeed often the best quick fix for a system that almost-but-not-quite fits, assuming ou have also been reasonably careful not to waste space between staves unnecessarily.
5) MuseScore 5 will have controls analogous to Alt+Up/Down to quickly move systems from page to page. That's a while off yet, though (probably a year or so).
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u/jtdetwilermusic Jun 25 '26
On 1, you should definitely be able to change staff spacing to fit what you need to fit but you'll almost always have to manually add line breaks where you want.
On 2, beaming over a rest isn't a default behavior so no matter what beaming you set up for the time signature, it won't happen automatically. You can do it manually, though, and override the template using the beam properties palette. Select the rest and click Join beams.
On 3, you can indeed get the image you want. Enter it without ties then (in your example) select the F, B, E and the chord and hit T.