Tip #35 - How to enter/space music on staff lines

There may be many different philosophies about how to do this, and I welcome suggestions from other MusEdit users, but this is one approach I use when, for example, I'm copying music from a transcription in a book:

1) Enter each line of music, but don't worry at all about spacing things out initially - simply type in the music as you see it, but in a very dense, ugly way. This may not look pretty, but it's very efficient to enter.

2) Once all the music has been entered, find the "densest" line (the one with the most notes or most complex symbols) and space it out according to the following principles:

-make the music look like it does in the transcription, or...

-quarter, half, and whole notes have a more space after them than shorter duration notes

-if more space is needed or available, put spaces on one or both sides of bars

-keep 16th and shorter notes clustered close together

-add space after time signatures

-add space as needed for extended objects and other such things

-add spaces elsewhere to make the staff line attractive and easy to read

3) Once the densest line is spaced out nicely it tends to define how long the longest staff line will be. You may want to set a fixed line length in the score based on this longest line... put the caret in the longest line, select Options}Set Staff Length (Ctrl+Shift+L) then set the length of all lines to the length of this longest line. Next, space the music in the other lines to nicely fill their staff lines, following the principles above.

4) FINALLY -and save this for last!- if there are lyrics you should add them now. The reason you want to save this for last is so you can take advantage of "Shift+Tab" to align the words with the music in treble or tab lines above the lyrics (more on this in another tip). Shift+Tab aligns words under the notes, but if you move the notes later the words aren't "dragged along" with the notes, so you want to wait until the notes are well positioned before you enter the words.

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