Vertical alignment of bar lines

[John Ruggero]

I was taught by a certain A. A. that it was a no-no to vertically align bar lines as in the following example because of the danger of the eye skipping to the next line:

Aligned barlines .png (153.24 KiB) Viewed 5015 times

What do members think of A. A.'s prohibition?

[MichelRE]

I wasn't "taught" this, but instinctively do it when preparing parts.
mind you, it VERY rarely pops up as an issue in my music, but still, it CAN happen.
I completely agree with this mysterious A.A.

[Fred G. Unn]

It gets a shrug from me. I understand the rationale, but it seems so unlikely to occur with modern engraved music as I'll almost never have strings of the same note value without any accidentals, lyrics, chords, etc to break up the line, that I don't worry about it. Even with your example, I'm not sure manually changing the spacing without a horizontal reason to do so (other than barline alignment) would look better as it might raise the question of why the spacing is different. And of course "master layout" parts on onion skin (like below) with aligned barlines were super common back in the hand copying era so you still it often enough. Nice to avoid if possible, but not worth worrying much about I guess.

masterlayout.png (167.8 KiB) Viewed 5008 times

[John Ruggero]

MIchelRE, good to hear. The mysterious A. A. was Arnold Arnstein.

Obviously, A. A never used pre-bar-lined paper, even for commercial work. FredGUnn, you just reminded me of Arnstein's specially printed transparent copying paper. It was staff-lined on both sides of the page, making corrections easier. I don't know how common that was at the time.

Most music is varied enough that the situation doesn't often arise. But when it does, and perhaps software makes it more likely to happen, I move a bar line or two to break it up. And aside from the other reason, measures lined up in rows looks very unattractive to me.

[John Ruggero]

FredGUnn, Here is the same example tweaked. I don't think it would raise any eyebrows, and it looks a lot better to me:

Tweaked barlines.png (152.59 KiB) Viewed 4918 times

I was curious how easy this would be in Dorico. Simply grabbing the notes in the first measure on each line and moving them with the note spacing tool in Engrave Mode did it easily.

[benwiggy]

You could use Note Spacing changes for the middle system.

[JJP]

What do members think of A. A.'s prohibition?

I agree 100%. Speaking as both a copyist and percussionist, the issue becomes especially acute on charts with rhythm slashes and few or no chords, like drum parts. It’s worse on computer copied or engraved than hand-copied parts. Hand-copied may have enough variation to mitigate the issue a bit. Otherwise the eye can’t find its bearing. It’s like staring at a blank sheet of graph paper.

[Fred G. Unn]

FredGUnn, Here is the same example tweaked. I don't think it would raise any eyebrows, and it looks a lot better to me:

Yeah, I agree.

Simply grabbing the notes in the first measure on each line and moving them with the note spacing tool in Engrave Mode did it easily.

Double-clicking with the Measure Tool then adding a small value (or subtracting by adding a negative value) in Measure Attributes / Display / Add: __ to width is pretty fast too.

[John Ruggero]

Interesting insights, JJP. Yes, the music could look a bit like one of those repetitive wallpaper patterns.

Thanks for the tips, benwiggy and FredGUnn. Do you think that this should be an option for Dorico to do automatically?

[Fred G. Unn]

Sorry John! I was assuming that was Finale when I commented about the Measure Tool. I think it's such an edge case that I don't think I've ever come across it in Dorico. I have zillions of projects of patterns, but I just looked through a bunch of them and I guess none have 3 consecutive systems of all the same duration with no chromatic alterations, so I've never run into it personally.