Music spacing

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 “notey” 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.

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 you document. The picture below illustrates this difference between Time Signature Spacing (or a scaling factor of 2.0) and a Fibonacci scaling factor of 1.618.

For information regarding the relationship between music spacing the score and linked parts, see Music Spacing in linked parts.

To turn off Automatic Music Spacing

• From the Finale 2009 Menu, choose Preferences > Program Options, then Edit. Uncheck Automatic Music Spacing. When the checkmark is not shown, Automatic Music Spacing is not enabled. Check the box to turn it back on.

To load an Music Spacing library into an open document

1. From the File Menu, choose Load Library. The Open dialog box appears, letting you navigate through the folders on your disk. Find and open the Libraries folder.
2. Double-click the name of the desired Music Spacing Library.

To reapply music spacing over a region

1. Click the Selection Tool  .
2. 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.
3. From the Music Spacing submenu of the Utilities Menu, choose either Apply Beat Spacing or Apply Note Spacing. If you use Beat Spacing, 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 Note Spacing, 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. Either command takes time. But when done processing, you’ll find that your music has been carefully respaced according to the Music Spacing Library’s specifications. Note: For a more complete discussion of Finale’s spacing feature, see Document Options-Music Spacing. The final step is extremely important:
4. Choose Update Layout from the Options Menu. 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. (Choosing Update Layout will solve the problem immediately.)

Note: 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 checkboxes, and click OK.

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.

1. Load an existing Music Spacing Library as described above.
2. From the Document Menu, choose Document Options and select Music Spacing. The Music Spacing options appear.
3. Click Spacing Widths, select Use spacing widths table, then click Widths. The Widths dialog box appears, displaying a durational value (measured in EDUs, 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 the Measurement Units command in the Edit Menu.) Click Duration 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. (To help you with the math, remember that 512 EDUs is an eighth note.) Or click Duration and click the durational value whose allotment you want to change.
4. 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.
5. 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; then click Insert. When you do this, it will appear that you’ve typed over an existing duration/allotment pairing. But in fact, when you click Insert, you merely add your new pair to the library.
6. Similarly, you can remove the displayed duration/allotment pairing by clicking Delete.  

Note the other options in this box, by the way—by selecting the appropriate checkboxes, 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. See Document Options-Music Spacing for details.

7. When you’re finished, click OK. Use the Music Spacing command (Utilities Menu) to apply the new allotments to your document.

To restore a region to proportional spacing

1. Click the Selection Tool  , and select the region you want to restore.
2. From the Utilities Menu, choose Music Spacing, then Apply Time Signature Spacing. 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 create a new Music Spacing library from scratch

1. Load one of the existing libraries. You’ll save time by simply modifying the allotment values of an existing library.
2. From the Document Menu, choose Document Options and select Music Spacing. The Music Options appear.
3. Click Spacing Widths, then click Widths.
4. Type over the existing allotment value for each duration value. Insert new duration values as needed, following the steps in “ To edit an existing Music Spacing Library,” above. 
5. When you’re finished, click OK. Use the Music Spacing command (Utilities Menu) to apply the new allotments to your document.

To save your edited or newly created Music Spacing library

1. Choose Save Library from the File Menu. The Save Library dialog box appears.
2. Click Music Spacing; then click OK. You’re then asked to title the new library.
3. Type in a new title and click Save (or press return). The next time you need your customized spacing, load the modified library (choose Load Library from the File Menu) and use one of the Music Spacing commands.

To specify minimum or maximum measure widths

If, after using Finale’s music spacing feature, you feel that the measures in your piece that contain whole rests (or whole notes) are too narrow or wide, you can adjust them all at once. For instructions, see To specify minimum or maximum measure widths.