Advice about layout/reducing pages

General notation questions, including advanced notation, formatting, etc., go here.

Moderators: Peter Thomsen, miker

mark carlson
Posts: 527
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 2:04 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by mark carlson » Thu Jul 13, 2017 12:11 am

I'm attaching here three songs from a set of six for flute, cello, voice, and piano, and they were originally copied on Finale in 1991-92. I'm prepping them for the publisher now, and I am hoping someone here can give me some advice about laying them out so that they
1) take fewer pages and
2) look better.

If it were not for the lyrics, I could have the songs take up fewer pages, but most of the time, adding a measure to a system makes the lyrics jam together and become illegible. But the notes often just look to spread out. Song #6, especially, looks too spread out.

Song #1 looks reasonably OK to me, so I am including it partly for reference.

I'm including Song #2 because I am wondering which looks worse--having 3 systems on just one page of the whole cycle, or having an extra page with only one system on it.

And as I mentioned, I'm wondering if there is any way in Song #6 (and really, all of them) to space the notes closer together without jamming the lyrics together.

FYI, I had these perfectly laid out, but it was with a .33" staff height, and the publisher prefers .25"--and that helped reduce the whole thing by 11 pages, which is helpful. But overall, it doesn't look as good. Also, many things shifted around in reducing the staff height, and I still have to fix those. I do know about most of them.

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark

2014.5
OS 10.11
Attachments
6. To Our Love 25.musx
(71.78 KiB) Downloaded 166 times
2. They Say....musx
(38.19 KiB) Downloaded 160 times
1. From One Who Stays....musx
(60.61 KiB) Downloaded 158 times


Luka Puka
Posts: 43
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2016 2:51 am
Finale Version: v25, macOS Ventura
Operating System: Mac

Post by Luka Puka » Sat Jul 22, 2017 6:15 pm

This is a bit of a late reply, but I just have a few sorta basic things I've used for many scores...

Resize Tool (percent sign at the top): Click on the top right of the first page, and entire a value out of 100 to reduce the score to.

Staff Tool (treble clef): Makes handles appear on staves that you can drag to space out each instrument and its staves, or bring them closer when possible.

I've used both of these tools plenty to either make room or condense my scores and save a couple pages.

In my opinion using the Resize Tool and reducing to about 95% or so, depending on how many instruments there are, makes notes look a lot better when they're smaller. The Staff Tool also lets you hide staves that don't have any notes in them, saving more room. To do this, select all measures with the Selection Tool, click Staff at the very top, and click Hide Empty Staves.

Hope this helped,
Luke

mark carlson
Posts: 527
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 2:04 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by mark carlson » Sat Jul 22, 2017 6:37 pm

Thanks, Luke! Yes, very helpful.

I resized the staff height to .25" and did some fiddling with things like adjusting syllables a bit to make more room around them. I was able to reduce the number of pages from 51 to 43--not a huge difference, but still a good thing. I think I've pretty much got it so that it looks good again. I hope so!

Mark

BuonTempi
Posts: 1297
Joined: Fri Aug 20, 2010 8:59 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by BuonTempi » Sun Jul 23, 2017 8:48 am

Nothing wrong with 3 systems on page 2 of Number 2 - infinitely preferable to a third page with just one system.

I'd say you could reduce the staff size even more. You'd need to increase the lyric size so that it's still legible, so swings and roundabouts. You're using a spacing table, rather than a scaling factor, which may give you better results. Adjust the "Minimum Size between Items" in Doc Opts > Music Spacing to a sightly larger value may avoid overall collisions.

By convention, you don't normally show the 1st measure number, and you don't need tempo marks on every staff. You might use a fixed point size to avoid the reduced tempo mark size on the top staff.

I'm guessing "1991 - 92" isn't your birth and death! :lol:

mark carlson
Posts: 527
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 2:04 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by mark carlson » Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:49 pm

Thanks for the advice! That is definitely some stuff I did not know about, in spite of using Finale since 1989.

Yes, I accomplished a lot in my one year of life!

Mark

Post Reply