What the process involves is setting exact margins, then fiddling each line, one by one, for staff size, accents, dynamics, etc. and lyric size and placement until all the staves fit in the most conflicted part of the score. My latest score has 5 visible vocal lines and 3 hidden layers, so that's a fair amount of juggling to avoid conflicts between above-staff marks and the lyrics of the previous staff. It doesn't help at all that accents are not placed properly by default (and I can't find any way to change the default) and have to be done as TEXT inputs.
It doesn't look so hot on the more spacious parts of the score, but that has to suffer for readability in the areas that are really tight - no page by page adjustments, unless you split up the score and print the various pages as separate docs.
Thanks for your help in the past and good luck to all,
Is there a way to change the look of the print output to make the music and lyrics more prominent and reduce the excessive white space I'm getting? The whole effect is to make the print copy harder to read - thin lines on acres of white paper.
I've played-around with the JPEG versions I've saved, but doing that kind of work in Photoshop is very tedious, if it can even be done without stretching or compressing the note shapes.
That's what I figured, Lawrie, and why I put the subject in the form of a question.
After dealing with it in the latest transcription, I've decided that it's best done in Photoshop since I can simply put the words in a transparent layer above the staves and push them around, duplicate, etc. to my heart's desire. Since I'm already doing little odds and ends, like inserting accents (>) in more reasonable places, formatting pages, cleaning up the dynamics and printing from that program anyway, I might as well just type in the lyrics there, too. There's no chance of losing my place and duplicate phrases are a breeze, just copy, paste and slide them to where they belong!
NWC is great for getting all the notes in place and keeping the measures aligned. I'd go nuts, if it didn't save me all the squinting and counting when getting the music down. But the lyrics handling seems like an afterthought. Too bad the programmers didn't think to make the lyrics a layer as easy to use as the music, instead of the separate box.
I think the comment tag might be helpful, but not really a lot better. If I have to put the measure numbers in manually, as I think this requires, it's still a lot of work to make sure the numbers are in the right places to keep the varying lyrics in as many as 10 voices aligned. It would be best if the numbers were above or below the lyric line or superimposed on it in a non-printing font, but put in automatically as I enter lyrics.
As usual with my problems (mostly), it has to do with trying to copy the manuscript exactly and the composer's shortcuts just don't translate to this medium.
I am getting there. I actually finished a shorter, easier one the other day with only a couple of dozen errors that my copy editor (read wife) found.
All help is appreciated, please just wait for the screaming and hair-pulling to subside.
How about automatic measure numbers in the lyric line? Jumping around from one staff to another of very similar, but not identical, lyrics for cut&paste applications is maddening.
For example: two voices are singing the same lyric, but with slightly different rhythms in some places. I can cut&paste, if I can find the right place to cut, but, then I also have to find the exact right spot to put the changes in one of the lines. And, since this is choral music with a couple of soloists and the melody is passed around among all of them, I currently have 6 lines that could much more easily be written, if I could just find those places easily.
I'd post the example, if I knew how and where. Do you want to see my screen shot or the program language? If the latter, how do I get it? I can link to a website that has some of my photos for a temporary place to post it.
I did check the note properties for the problem measure and everything is set to default, the same as the preceding and succeeding measures.
The situation is this: there are 5 repeats of a single word by the same voice held for two bars each time in the score (2 whole notes, tied across the bar line), but if I put 5 repeats of the word in the lyric line, it shifts the subsequent measures of lyrics out of alignment and skips the 4th pair of measures! That staff is not layered.
RE: NoteWhizzy: it looks like this only applies a given set of durations from the beginning of a staff sequence to selected immediately subsequent measures, whereas I have a pattern I'd like to apply any where in the score and on unconnected measures.
For example: maesure 7 in the soprano voice first uses the pattern for the melody line, it repeats in 2 subsequent measures (and NoteWhizzy does it's job), but then the pattern repeats in measure 12 through 14 and I don't see how I can apply the pattern without reselecting it in measure 12 and running the whole thing again. Further, the pattern is then taken up by the tenors in measure 23 through 25.
If I understand it properly, it's not a simple cut and paste and paste again, etc., so it doesn't save me all that much - 7 clicks for NoteWhizzy vs 8 or 10 clicks to do it manually on each of the 3 bar repeats.
To really save me any significant number of strokes, it would let me select the pattern once and just apply everywhere I needed it. Even if I had to select each measure each time, it would save 3 strokes per instance for this case, vs one or two per group as it seems to work.
RE: RickG's link: again I may not be understanding exactly what the macro does, but it looks like a cut&paste workaround. Please correct me if it will actually do what I describe above, that is apply a pattern to any similar group of notes anywhere in a multi-voice score.
I'm running into repetitive note durations in a measure: subsequent measures have exactly the same duration, but different notes. Is there a way to cut and paste only the durations onto a series of notes without applying the exact same notes?
For example: (a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth) three times must appear a hundred times in the current transcription, in different voices and on different pitches. It would save me a lot of key punching if I could just lift the durations and apply them successively.
Frank, check the Lyric Syllable settings for note properties in the offending bars. It may be you're trying to anchor a lyric to a chord with a note set to "never."
I've got a situation where the lyric refuses to put a word in the right place on a measure:
There's a repetition of a word held for two bars 5 times, 10 bars total, with slightly different double note chords on each repetition, but the lyric will not put one of the words under one of the measures, the 7th.
I've looked at settings for the lyrics and the measure but can't see any reason why it should be skipped. I've also deleted and reinserted the lyric and the initial chord.
Fortunately, Charles Frink's manuscript is a model of how good a manuscript can be. Festival Chorale Oregon actually did perform from copies of my copies with only some difficulty - I can't imagine that happening with the ones you describe. What I'm doing is polishing the apple, if I had to work with a poor manuscript, I don't know enough about music to succeed.
I'm hoping that getting the music into this form will give it a new life and maybe get some interest in Charles's other work. I also have a score of one of his original works based on a Whitman poem, but that's a much larger piece and I'm not prepared to convert 140 pages for voices and small orchestra. Fortunately, that score is so easy to read in manuscript, I think all I have to do is put out a clean copy and extract the parts.
You can insert a key signature of C Major set to Visibility: Never just before the new signature. Cancellations are not an error, but their use is considered no longer necessary (unless the new signature has no sharps or flats).
Thanks, K.A.T., I had guessed that that might be true, given the NWC2 default setting. Still, I am trying to duplicate what was written 20+ years ago and my friend used the older standard. NJF
AND
David Palmquist wrote: "Printing to a file - I do it by creating PDFs with pdfcreator.exe, freeware from http://sourceforge.org"
Ah, you tricked me there! I thought you meant directly from NWC2. NJF
I couldn't find an option to print to a file, how do you do it?
As to editing: Photoshop allows either typing in sections using all the NWC fonts or cutting/pasting/duplicating graphic elements of any size, like adding chord members by copying notes from other staves or typing and then pasting it on a transparent layer wherever you want it with all the lower layer staff showing through. Much like layering in NWC, but with the added ability to grab, copy and move anything anywhere and to transform shapes, erase errors (like the left over marks when cancelling part of a key signature to make a change, since you can't select blanks from NWC's custom key signature menu), format pages, resize to any amount and setup pages as you will. How about stretching or compressing slurs, ties and hairpins? It's a snap - far easier than all the key strokes needed to do it in NWC and with greater finesse.
Formatting title pages is another simple task, just grab stuff and move them around as you please.
For only the few extra steps involved, I can't imagine why you'd struggle with a word processor to do the job a graphics editor will do so much easier and more thoroughly. Or why you'd send the edited file back to a word processor when you can output JPEG, for your email, or any of a dozen or so other file formats, directly from the graphics editor.
Although graphics editors, especially Photoshop, have way more ability than this job needs and a steep learning curve to master it's complexity, you can get by with only the most elementary and easy to learn functions. The latest versions can be quite expensive and demanding of system resources, but you won't need any of them to do this work - a version as old as Photoshop v4 or the early versions of Photoshop Elements will handle all of this easily, so you could try to find an obsolete version at a reasonable price and with less demand on your system resources.
Maybe I didn't mention it in this thread, but I'm trying to produce a +/- publication quality score from a manuscript - a 20 year old photocopy of a manuscript, in fact.
The friend is New London, CT composer/historian/political leader Charles Frink and the score is a set of arrangements of African-American Spirituals which are to be performed by the Festival Chorale Oregon in September.
The FCO did perform them recently from copies of my copies of the manuscripts and there was some confusion and difficulties in reading the music. I hope to prevent that from becoming a reason to put the scores aside and also hope to get the music better known as they are by far the best arrangements of Spirituals that I have ever heard and one time long ago had the pleasure of performing.
Quote from: Rick G.
Try legal size paper in Print Setup. Drawback is that it takes a bit more memory in your image editor.
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The way I'm doing it, by the time I get it into Photoshop to edit the graphics file it's about 10 Meg per letter size page and only 1 Meg in memory as a monochrome JPEG.
I don't know what the original poster wanted to do, but I found this thread because I want 2 systems of staves on the first page, not just one.
What I did, after reading the suggestion about the Title Font size, was that plus setting the bottom margin to zero. Then I got my two systems on the page so that I can set it up much more easily the way I want in a graphics image editor for more professional printing.
Rick is right about the quality of screen captures, 72 dpi is the pits for printing! I'm looking for 300 dpi quality so that I can get good reproduction, even if that means photocopies of my masters.
RickG: PDF files require full-on Acrobat for editing (I'm not only printing from Photoshop, I'm correcting some things NWC2 doesn't do well, like setting up the pages) and I already have Photoshop which I am thoroughly familiar with for my photographic exhibition prints, so that's a no-brainer for me - I don't need another Adobe headache! That also obviates the need for GhostScript and RedMon. My kludgy workaround is a pain, but, at least, I don't have to get and learn any more software.
My method is functional, but not nearly as good as if NWC2 actually output a graphic image file for editing and printing. Also, because of some of the, shall we say "unfelicitous", ways NWC2 handles graphics (see another post realted to that), straight output is not acceptable for this complex score. Or even some of the less complex ones I've got to do.
My imagination balks at having the bars, notes, dynamics and lyrics run all over each other! The music is fairly complex with 4 or 5 voices singing different lyrics simultaneously at times and the chorus bass and soprano also split sometimes with different lyrics and dynamics. It needs room!
I'm only interested in putting out paper copies, so the various relationships are critical and the small staves needed to make the suggestion work are just too crowded for my taste.
I have solved some of the problem: the Grand Staves are properly connected and the Chorus staves are, too, they're just no connected together, but I think we can live with that.
As an aside, I also have gotten the printout into Photoshop, as high quality JPEG files to save space, and the printout is excellent. Too bad it is so much more work: from NWC2, preview/copy to clipboard; paste into Atlantis word processor (slow graphic handling of the huge NWC2 file, even at the printer's lowest setting of 360dpi); reduce color quality to 2 colors; save as JPEG; open with Photoshop; resize to reasonable photo-quality output (letter size, 300dpi grayscale file); then print one page at a time. But, at least, once in Photoshop I can manipulate the graphic file to my heart's content and remove all the duplicate and conflicting marks.
Thanks for the try, but that requires a limited space above and below the staff that I can't accommodate with lyrics below and dynamic marks above and below to clearly mark split soprano and bass chorus lines with different dynamics.
I have a score of 5 staves, 3 upper are Grand Staves and the 2 lower are SA and TB. The original composer has all bar lines going across all the staves and I can't figure out how to do that with NWC2 beta. I got the 3 upper Grands connected by making some hidden layered staffs Orchestral, but I can't get the lower 2 to connect up and there are gaps in bar lines above staff 4. So there is a gap between 3 and 4 with extended bar lines sticking up.
I tried adding a hidden layered staff of 0 lines between the 3 Grands and the 2 Orchestrals, but it didn't work no matter if it was Standard or Orchestral.
The problem looks like I can't give the lowest Grand Staff or a staff layered with it, properties that will allow it to extend the bar lines down to meet staff 4.
I'm transcribing some arrangements for a friend and I'm only interested in good quality paper output - essentially matching his notation as best possible.
I'm using beta 2.16 and find typing in the notes and indications to be very tedious. Is there a preferred way to work?
I'm setting up a choral score of 7 voices and there are times when dynamics and cresc. and decresc. are duplicated in two lines (at other times they are different, too), can I copy and paste whole sections of dynamic marks from one to the other? Maybe I should put the dynamics in first and then copy that section of staff to the other voice and add the notes afterward?
He uses a lot of dynamic markings and sometimes they get crowded so that placement of a dynamic and a decresc. and another dynamic have to be placed on on a couple of notes. I often have to play with locating them 4 or 5 times before I get them cleared up, even when added spacing of notes has been applied. "Best fit", Best fit forward", etc. don't always solve the problem, I wish I could just grab the mark and put it exactly where I want it or stretch a hairpin to fit. Any advice on how to do this efficiently?
Any other shortcuts to this time-consuming task? I'm not a musician and read music poorly, so I'm doing it by the click and check method, analogous to hunt and peck in typing except that I have to look from the manuscript to the screen and back for almost every mark. It takes me about an hour per page and I have a lot of pages.
