For those who are very advanced here in Dorico. Is there an easier way of doing note spacing? Not to compare, but Finale had a spacing option to space out the notes. It seems with Dorico I would have to go through each note and ear bar individually with the short cuts on the keyboard, as it’s taking a long time (as it feels like the keyboard short cut movements are very slow). Is my only option is to make the system 3 bars instead of 4?
Hi @brianjmark, I would suggest to go through some videos on Youtube Channel, to understand better how Dorico works.
For note spacings, here (I suggest to look at the whole video, but the link jumps directly to the note spacing chapter):
and this more recent video (also the link jumps to the Note Spacing chapter, but look at the whole video):
Layout Options> Note Spacing (for the global settings in each layout)
and
Engrave>Note Spacing change to affect parts of a layout.
Only adjust the spacing of each individual note on the rarest of occasions.
The example you show clearly has too much material on the system as indicated by the red fill% on the right hand edge.
To add on to what others have said: In Dorico you don’t need to do anything special to “apply” note spacing – Dorico is always spacing things automatically. If you run into problems, like the above, most of the time it’s because you’ve tried to crowd more music into a system or a frame than Dorico thinks can fit. In cases like this, the first step is usually to delete any manual breaks that you’ve added and let Dorico space things by itself.