![]() If all of that seems a bit confusing, well, here’s a bit more. However, if you have a Finale staff at 7.0 mm, 10 pt relative text will appear smaller, at about 8.3 pt, or only about 83% of the size it would appear in Sibelius or Dorico, because Finale’s baseline staff is larger. In other words, 10 pt relative text will appear legitimately as 10 points, if applied to a Finale staff at 8.47 mm, a Sibelius staff staff at 7.0 mm, or a Dorico staff at approximately 7.05 mm. What does this mean for you? It means that at those staff sizes, the absolute size of your text will equal the relative size. In Dorico it’s 20 pt, which is just ever so slightly greater than 7 mm (7.05556 mm). … but in Finale it’s 24 pt, which is exactly 1/3 inch (about 8.47 mm). The question is, though, if you choose relative sizes, to what setting is the size relative?īehind the scenes, each of their programs have their baseline staff sizes. You don’t want to scale those items to be so small in a conductor score as to be unreadable, but it’s often helpful for those items to bear some relationship to the musical elements. System text (such as tempos and rehearsal marks) can be either absolute or relative, depending on your situation. Absolute sizes are generally better for titles, page headers, and page numbers, while relative sizes are generally better for staff text. ![]() Points are technically an absolute unit of measurement, but in all of the notation programs, you have the option to define text size as either an absolute (fixed) size, or relative to the size of the staff. You see this all the time in word processing programs and many other applications, including the notation programs. Points generally refer to the size of text, defined as 1/72 of an inch (about 0.353 mm). In Finale, these settings are found in Document > Page Format:Īnd as shown here in Dorico, in Setup > Layout Options > Page Setup. Most crucially, of course, you’ll also use this to define the height of your staff. Generally, you’d use inches or millimeters (depending upon your localization) to refer to page layout items, such as the page size, page margins, and staff margins. You might ask, though, what about units such as inches, millimeters, and points? These settings, which all refer to absolute measurements, also appear in documents. The optimal settings for every item are a matter of taste and style, but legibility should always be paramount. Now that you know what a space is, you’ll notice these settings all across your document. Sibelius: Appearance > House Style > Engraving Rules.You might think that its thickness would be a matter of settled notation law, but in the three major notation programs, the thickness of a staff line in a default is different in each:Īll of the above settings can be customized to your liking, of course. Indeed, the thickness of the aforementioned staff line itself is measured in spaces. But these basic settings matter as much as anything to affect how your music appears. When you start working with music notation software it might be puzzling to poke around in your program’s settings and see “0.0918” or “1/8 spaces”. Yet even if you’re an experienced musician, if you’ve never prepared notation music you’ve probably not given much thought to the idea. It’s so essential that it’s the very first item mentioned by Elaine Gould in her music notation reference Behind Bars, and it can be scaled regardless of the absolute size of the music. Everything can be measured as it relates to the space. And with that, you’re off and running creating notated music.īut it’s the space as a unit of measurement that defines the appearance of all other notational items. Filling the gaps between those lines are spaces, also representing pitches upon which other noteheads are placed. The most fundamental element of conventional Western music notation is the five-line staff, the quintet of equidistant lines that represent musical pitches upon which noteheads are placed. The distance between two lines is always one space. If you’re thinking in millimeters, inches, or points, think again. ![]() What is the distance between two lines on a staff? ![]()
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