Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Treble and bass are a mile apart

Well, maybe not a mile, but I have some sheet music books where the treble and base clef are separated by four or five lines of well-spaced lyrics so.. maybe just a half-mile?

Anyway, when I try to read a score with this much separation I feel like I'm watching a vertical game of Pong.

My best idea so far is to do some scanning and cutting-and-pasting to shorten up that gap to something more reasonable.

What do you folks do with a score that's printed this way? Just live with it and get used to it?

Never bought any like that but it would be consigned to the bin if I ever did. I am pretty fussy about how the score should look.

Hymnals and other volumes are printed with all the lines of the lyrics in between the staves, and yes, there can often be four or five lines. Reading the score is a learned skill of training your eyes to move quickly between the treble and base. The better you are a chord and interval recognition, the easier the reading of the score becomes.

How to handle it? If you plan on playing a lot of music written this way, of course work on the skill by playing this type of score A LOT, I would suggest picking up a used hymnal and playing a few a day so that chord and interval recognition gets easier and quicker. If playing this type of music will not be frequent, photocopy it, cut and paste.

It's actually one of the old Readers Digest Songbooks. There's some really good music in it, but sheesh.

I have a couple of books where they print the score "normally" and print the lyrics either over or under the whole thing. Then the spacing doesn't matter much. Too bad the Readers Digest folks didn't learn to do it that way.

Xerox and fold, no cutting. You get better alignment that way. Glue stick instead of paste.

I think I'll scan those pages into images, then cut out what I want and re-assemble it with GIMP before printing it. No glue needed, and I can even cut down the number of pages (and page turns).

I never thought to do that . . . .and for music bought (acquired) over the internet, an ideal solution.

How to chop a score down to size using free software

There really isn't much involved in doing this but for the benefit of anyone who would like detailed instructions, here they are:

The easiest way to do this is with two programs, one of which is a graphic editor and the other is a desktop publishing program.

You can download the graphic editor here.

You can download the desktop publishing program here.

Both of these programs are free so it won't cost you anything at all to do this.

You can start with either a pdf or a graphic of the score that you want to cut down to size. Load the graphic or pdf into gimp; if it's a multi-page pdf you will be given the opportunity to select the pages that you want to import. Select the "Open Pages as Images" option in that window.

Now you have your original pages, each in its own window. Use the Rectangle Select Tool and select the area of the score that you want to keep. Edit - Copy. Edit - Paste as New Image.

Export the new graphic and name it 1.png

Repeat for all of the pieces that you want from the original score. 1.png, 2.png, 3.png, and so on.

Load Scribus. New Document.

Insert Image Frame. Outline the frame size that you want for the first piece. Right-click within the outlined area. Get Image. Select 1.png. Place the frame on the page as desired. Insert Image Frame again. And repeat for all of the pieces that you cut out of the original score.

Need another page? Page - Insert as required.

Done? File -Export - Save as PDF

Now you have a pdf of your cut-down score.

I just cut one down by removing the unneeded lyrics and now I have a two page score instead of a three page score. And now I can read it without blowing any fuses in my brain.

You should work on being able to read scores however they are printed. Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter used to practice sight-reading by playing duets, with one of them playing both left-hand parts while the other played both right-hand parts. This is hard enough when playing from a score, but much harder when the secondo is on the left- and the primo on the right-hand page.

Makes me think of this...

If you are going to go through that much work and investment of time why not just enter the score yourself into a score writer like notepad or musescore . You will learn a lot about to the piece to be sure. Plus get it printed out the way you want.

Time, effort and accuracy.

I considered re-entering it but it really took less than five minutes to cut-and-re-assemble the three page score as I described above.

I just looked at a score on my piano and counted the notes for one line of music. There were 84 notes. I'd think that deleting one space would take much less time than entering 84 notes and then having to check for accuracy. For Frank's idea, there is no reason why you cannot also print out the results.