By default, MuseScore arranges your sheet music to optimise available space
and also to avoid collisions. However, from time to time,
you may still want to make manual adjustments of your own.
All the functions that affect layout can be found in the "Layout" palette.
The most important of these are the break functions.
In this example, I want this measure to move down to the next system.
To do this, I can click on the barline where I want the break to occur
and then select this "System break" element. This places a system break icon on the score,
which you can simply delete if you want to return the score to how it was before.
The "Section break" is an element that can be used to specify
where you’d like a new section to occur.
This new section will return the measure numbers back to one.
It's worth mentioning that if you'd like to set a final barline at the end of this section,
you can do so by clicking on the line and then choosing the "Final barline" option
in the "Properties" panel. You can also do this using the "Barlines" palette.
Lastly, you can use the "Page break" element to move all measures
beyond the point it’s inserted to the next page.
If you want to toggle off the visibility of these "System", "Section" and "Page break" icons,
you can do this by selecting the "Formatting" setting in the "Properties" panel.
And don't worry, whether or not you do this,
these icons will never be visible in your exported or printed sheet music.
Sometimes, you may wish to alter the space between staves.
To do this, there are three different "Spacer" arrows in the "Layout" palette.
Once applied, you can click and drag these arrows
to finely adjust the vertical space between staves.
Now we’re going to look at working with Parts. If you have more than one instrument
or voice in your score and want to create individual parts for each of them,
the first place to start is by clicking on this "Parts" button at the top of the score window.
This triggers a dialog that shows all the available parts in your score.
Now if you want to open more than one part at a time,
simply hold Shift to select a range of instruments,
or Control (or Command on a Mac) to select a number of individual instruments.
Then click "Open Selected". If you want to open all available parts at the same time,
all you have to do is click "Open all". And you can see that they’re now all visible
as tabs above the score.
The "Parts" dialog is tightly integrated with the new "Instruments" panel.
This integration makes it easy for you to create and customise parts
with any combination of instruments from your score.
Say you want to make the violin 2 part visible in this violin 1 part.
First, let’s select the violin 1 part so it’s visible in the score window.
Obviously all we can see at the moment is the violin 1 stave.
So next, we’ll go over to the "Instruments" panel,
where we can see all of the other instruments in this score.
Notice, however, that they’re all currently showing as “not visible”.
To make any of these instruments visible in this part, simply click on this visibility icon.
Now our Violin 2 stave is showing in this part for Violin 1.
We can rearrange these instruments, by clicking and dragging them in the "Instruments panel",
so they appear in whatever order we want in this particular part.
The best thing about this is that this in no way affects how the main score looks.
Sometimes you’ll want to create individual parts from a score
where different instruments or voices share a single stave.
For example, to create a separate part for each of the two voices on this flute staff,
open the "Parts" dialog and click "Create new part".
We’ll double-click on this new part to rename it “Flute 2”.
Now hold control (or command on a Mac) to select both of these parts,
and click “Open selected”.
This new “Flute 2” part is currently empty,
while our original Flute part contains both voices from the main score.
What we want to do is hide the second voice in our original Flute part,
and reveal it in the “Flute 2” part.
So let’s start by going over to the Instruments panel.
Click on this icon for the available part, and select this settings button
then uncheck the box next to voice 2.
Now we can only see voice 1 in this part.
Next, we’ll go over to the “Flute 2” part,
and reveal the flute instrument in the "Instruments" panel.
We’ll again go over to this settings button, and this time, uncheck the “voice 1” box.
Now we can see voice 2 in our part for “Flute 2”.
The last thing we might want to do is export these parts as individual PDFs.
Go to File > Export. This triggers the “Export” dialog,
where you can see all of the available parts in your score.
You can use the checkboxes to select only those parts you wish to export,
or you can select them all at once by clicking this "Select all" button.
We’ll leave the “Format” settings as they are which, by default,
will export each part as a separate file in the PDF format.
When you’re ready, click “Export” to choose where you want to save your files
and you're ready to go!
The "Instruments" panel is new to MuseScore 4,
and while it already allows you to really customise your score and parts,
we look forward to developing it in future releases
to make it even more powerful and useful.
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