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Topic: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-) (Read 3680 times) previous topic - next topic

anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Hi there,

though I always thought my English is good enough, the NWC really causes me troubles. A lot of things I found out by  trial and error. But I must say that a German manual would be of great help.
A lot of vocabulary is very specific and sometimes no explanation to be found anywhere.
I'm trying to set up a kind of songbook (fakebook???) and any help would be gladly appreciated.

I managed create a staff with the whole song. I also managed to insert the chord names above. I also managed to insert the lyrics below.

But I can't manage to split this staff so that it will appear properly on the print out, e.g I want every line of the verse to have its own staff.
Difficult to explain because of my lack of music-specific vocabulary.

It would be great if anyone could explain this to me (maybe in German) so that I will be able to understand this programm.

Kind regards

Sabine

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #1 –
Sorry, I cannot write in German.

Each music staff is of infinite length. If you need to print one page with separate music and words for each singer, you must have one staff ("system")for each singer.

Each staff can have its own lyrics.  After you've written the notes in the staff, while in that staff, you add the lyrics.  Press Control and L to do that.  You must set the line count, which is the number of verses, not the number of separate parts.

If you want both singers to read the same notes on a staff, but perhaps to have them answering each other, you can do that by making two identical staffs of music, add the lyrics to each one, use the "layer staff" feature to superimpose them, and adjust the 'offset' positions of the lyrics so they print on separate lines.

When displaying lyrics, each syllable is matched with the next note in its staff.  For each singer's words, you will have to add an underscore separated by spaces  _  or a hyphen - to move the syllables past the notes you don't want this person to sing.

Hope this helps.  And I hope it works.

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #2 –
If you just want to split the staff, say, every 4 measures (or wherever you wish), you need to inser line breaks.

Select the bar line (on the topmost staff) at which you want to split it and press Ctrl+E (or is that Strg+E in German keyboards?). Then just check Force System Break.

The change doesn't show on-screen (except for the ¶ indicator), but you can see the results in Print Preview.

(Übrigens, ich versuchte auch diese Antwort auf Deutsch zu geben, aber mein musikalische Wortschatz war zu klein :)

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #3 –
Sabine: Here are several examples. Which of these is closest to your problem?

EXAMPLE 1:
Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass:
S:Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,
A: Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,
T: Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,
B: Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,

S: Twenty-five barrels of beer,
A: Twenty-five barrels of beer,
T: Twenty-five barrels of beer,
B: Twnety-five barrels of beer,

S: Take one down and pass it around,
A: Take one down and pass it around,
T: Take one down and pass it around,
B: Taken one down and pass it around,

S: Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.
A: Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.
T: Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.
B: Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.

EXAMPLE 2:
Solo:
Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,
Twenty-five barrels of beer,
Take one down and pass it around,
Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.

EXAMPLE 3:
Chorus:
(1) Twenty-five barrels of beer on the wall,
(2) Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall,

(1) Twenty-five barrels of beer,
(2) Twenty-four barrels of beer,

(1) Take one down and pass it around,
(2) Take one down and pass it around,

(1) Twenty-four barrels of beer on the wall.
(2) Twenty-three barrels of beer on the wall.

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #4 –
25 barrels of beer?  In my day it was 99 bottles.

When my eldest was a baby, I used to sing her to sleep with this tune.  Once, she was so cranky I got down to 28 bottles before she closed her eyes. My wife went for a long walk that evening.

My daughter has a kid of her own now, and the little guy doesn't like the song.  So the day he was born, I hummed him to sleep with Mood Indigo.  He hasn't been able to sleep since...

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #5 –
Thank you all!

What I was looking for - indeed - was a line break :o)

I wanted the sheet music to look like this (hope this works...)

1.staff
chords....................
(notes) cdefgahc....
(lyrics)25 barrels of beer .....

(space)
2.staff
chords
notes
25 barrels of beer...

3staff
chords
notes
take one down and pass it around....

and so one, so that every new line has its own staff.
When I started I only made one staff and began :o). Just to find out that on the print out the line break was made automatically. And I was wondering if I would be able to force a line break.

Thanks again, I will have a second try (and a third and a...). Good to know that there are people here to help :o)

Have fun and keep the music rolling

Sabine

my website: www.cantalibre.de

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #6 –
Just a note to tell you that everything went well and I managed to do what I wanted to do :o)

Thanks again

Sabine

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #7 –
Happy to hear that Sabine figured it out. The "line break" is called "force system break" in NWC. It is a property that can be applied to any measure bar in the upper staff line.

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #8 –
SOMETIMES there will be a natural break before your "forced system break" due to the length of the measures, the number of notes in them, or lyrics.  So, only three measures would fit on the system, but you wanted four.

This can sometimes be adjusted by making the margins more narrow, gaining just enough room to allow four measures to fit.  Adjust this in Page Setup, Margins tab.

Or, you may try going to Page Setup, Options tab, and uncheck "Increase note spacing for larger note durations".  But appearance is sometimes not good with this, and it makes it more difficult to read.

Another thing you may try is at Page Setup, Options tab, changing the Staff Size to a smaller size (decreasing the point number).  Personally, I find 18 is about the minimum practical size for most musicians with complex music.  With more simple music, 16 might be OK.

Adjusting the top and bottom margins will allow you move systems from page to page (don't you hate it when you have two full pages, and one or two measures on a third page?), or to fill out pages more evenly.  Also, you may adjust in Staff Properties, Visual tab, the Vertical size upper and lower limits.  This will affect spacing between systems for better appearance.

I call all of this "editing for appearance", and use these techniques to have the systems spread out evenly on the pages.
 

Re: anyone here to support a dumb blonde German? ;-)

Reply #9 –
And to add one more hint:  another technique (in addition those mentioned) is to adjust the top and bottom heights of the staff to allow for more space between staffs.  Sometimes adding a few of points to the height is enough to spread out the staffs so you don't just have a few measures on the last page; or by reducing the height, enough to bring those measures back onto the previous page.

John Ford