On 10 Feb 2004, at 06:28 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
You're not alone. The type of music you describe is particularly problematic for balancing music spacing and lyric spacing considerations. With the partial exception of the TG Tools, I don't know of anything that would really qualify as non-labor-intensive.
Perhaps someone will show me otherwise, but in my experience is that if you want really good spacing for music with lyrics you need to go through and set it yourself. If you're interested, I could share some general techniques which I've found useful in reducing the work.
In your case, the first thing I would recommend is this:
(1) Space the entire piece just as you've described;
(2) Ignoring the ugly spacing for now, check that the page layout is how you like it, and lock all the system breaks;
(3) Go into Music Spacing Options and uncheck Lyrics;
(4) Respace the entire piece, and update layout.
This will put all the notes pretty much where you're going to want them to be. Now you can go through the piece and push syllables left or right as needed (mostly right).
Hi Mark,
Thanks for posting your procedure -- I don't have too much experience with vocal music, so I'm still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. As I turns out, I guess I must be doing at least something right, because my procedure is pretty much the same as your first four steps. However, once I've done that, I have previously been reluctant to move syllables around too much -- maybe a couple of nudges here or there (especially on hyphenated syllables), but I mostly try to resolve problems by making the whole measure wider, or sometimes widening the problematic half of the measure with TGTools -- or, of course messing with the beat chart. I was sort of surprised to find that it's kosher to make major adjustments in syllable positioning. Do you have a maximum threshold for how far you can get away with moving syllables?
If you're a perfectionist like me, you'll also make additional spacing adjustments to certain bars on a case-by-case basis -- especially if nearby bars have wide variations in note/lyric density.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about here?
Cheers,
- Darcy
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