Spacing the music

As noted earlier in Tutorial 1, Finale is automatically applying professional publisher-standard note spacing to your music as you go along. (This feature can be turned off by deselecting Automatic Music Spacing from Program Options-Edit.) Automatic Music Spacing not only spaces the notes, it is designed to avoid the collision of chords, lyrics, and other score elements. In most cases, you will never need to worry about this feature. However, you may encounter instances when the music does not appear to be spaced correctly; usually, the automatic spacing hasn’t been triggered yet. Here, then, are the steps to follow to perform music spacing (it has not yet been performed in this score so you can see the effects):

1. Click the Selection Tool  .
2. Click just to the left of the top staff, in any staff system. This is a quick way to select an entire staff with one click. You’ll notice that the whole line is highlighted. Because we don’t want to overlook the bass staff while making spacing decisions, we’ll need to select the bass staff, too.
3. Hold down the key and click just to the left of the bass staff, in any staff system. Now both staves should be highlighted through the entire piece.
4. From the Utilities menu, choose Apply Music Spacing, then Apply Note Spacing. When Finale’s finished, you might notice that the spacing of music and barlines is much more professional looking. Every measure is exactly as wide as it needs to be, and every note is allotted exactly the right amount of horizontal space. Music spaced in this way is said to have nonlinear spacing, as in published music: A whole note doesn’t get as much horizontal space as four quarter notes—it actually gets much less. For more information about Finale’s three music spacing types, see the User Manual under Music Spacing.

There is one more critical behind-the-scenes function in action here: Update Layout. Again, Finale is configured to perform this function automatically (it can be disabled by deselecting Automatic Update Layout from Program Options-Edit).

Use Time Signature Spacing in the Utilities menu, Music Spacing submenu, to restore default spacing.

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