MuseScore in Minutes: Layouts & Parts

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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feature updates and new releases,

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