Trying to find a balance in staff sizes

[NeeraWM]

Hello everyone,
first post here and thrilled to join the community.

While I have been engraving music for a living for 10 years, I have never understood why the suggested staff size for parts in, e.g., MOLA Guides, are so big (7-8.5mm). If we take Henle as a comparison, specifically Bach Gamba Sonata, they use 6.4mm for piano staves and 6.7 for solo staves in parts.
It may be I am struggling with my Horizontal Note Spacing options in Sibelius & Dorico but I have never been able to create a good-looking score with 7mm+ staves (Educational Music apart), assuming 9x12 or 8.5x11 or A4 paper sizes.

How are you managing this?
What is your preferred staff size and why?

Thank you very much

[Fred G. Unn]

I typically use a 7mm (size 3) staff for single staff parts on 9.5"x12.5" paper. In my template that results in 11 staves per page from page 2 onward, but in practice once filled with music it is usually 10 or even 9. For new music that is likely to be under-rehearsed, clarity of layout is really important. There also needs to be enough space in the margins and between staves for the performer to mark any bowings, additional cues, cuts, etc. The spacing and staff size requirements for new orchestral music are really quite different than for example a solo piano piece that will likely be practiced until memorized anyway.

Further complicating things is the fact that many string players share a desk, so Violin players may be positioned even further from the music and at an angle when compared to a Flute for example. When you consider advancing age and older eyeballs too, then larger staff sizes are very helpful. For a recording session, larger sizes and generous spacing are both very important too. There will typically be one pass as a rehearsal when any markings, edits, or cuts will be made, and then the next pass will be a take. If the notation is unclear resulting in performance errors, each additional take can be very expensive! Per Local 802 (NYC) contract, 50 orchestra musicians hired for a 3-hour film recording session costs about $21,000. An extra 10 minutes to do another take would effectively cost over $1,000 so making the music legible and clear is obviously very important if you want to keep work as a copyist.

I don't typically use a size 2 staff, but I wouldn't find it overly large either. It's been a long time since I did any work for Emily Grishman, but I seem to recall her work being about that size, so that would be a pretty standard size for Broadway orchestras too.

FWIW, Boosey & Hawkes uses 7mm for new work:


UE uses 7.5mm:

[NeeraWM]

Thanks for your feedback!
My issue with 7mm+ may not be the sheer size of the staff, rather the way Sibelius manages horizontal spacing when things get tight. At 7mm+, in 4/4, no more than 2 bars of 16th notes will ever fit, sometimes looking very dull.
I was fascinated from the Collection Litolff scores, where I saw the most beautiful layout ever with 7.62mm staff, 9.27x12in page, margins bigger than 1in and everything fitting in nicely. I could not reproduce this in Sibelius. It is possible that the Note Spacing settings could be improved but in the end it's the snap bug that kills my intents (I refer to when you Alt-Shift-Left Arrow to nudge a note and it suddenly gets on top of the previous one).

I also have to say that I mainly engrave music that will not have to be so urgently performed, so Henle's 6.7mm is proving to be a soft spot, right now.
I was surprised by Scodo asking for A4 format and 7mm staves, I have never managed to like the outcome.
I have no experience in film music (possibly because I live in a small town remote from film production centres) but I have never used 9.5x12.5 paper even if, for me, the bigger paper the better!

The only times when I can use 7mm+ is when the music is not too dense or when it is for educational purposes.
I will try to share a page from my engravings tomorrow, to know if what I do is too small—the editor likes it, but I need to be open and grow.

[David Ward]

Elaine Gould has a useful list of recommended stave sizes on page 483 of her book.

FWIW my own experience has been that the staves of shared string or percussion parts may benefit from being a bit larger than the staves on the parts for wind, brass or chamber strings (let alone keyboards). I never had the slightest difficulty reading trombone parts a little smaller than the officially recommended size if they were otherwise clear and well laid out.

In Finale the arithmetical convolutions necessary for checking one's stave size seem utterly bonkers (at least to me). I seem to remember that when I wanted to compare the stave size in a full score printed to A3 or to B4, I first had to fiddle around with % system scaling in Document Page Format and then had to multiply (or was it divide?) by the square root of 1.5. I'd rather naively imagined that that was the sort of information a computer should supply automatically as soon as one chose the various potential page sizes for printing.

[Fred G. Unn]

I have never used 9.5x12.5 paper even if, for me, the bigger paper the better!

If you're in the US, this is surprisingly easy to obtain with just a couple of inquiries. Obviously you can't just go to Staples and get it, but virtually any paper supplier can obtain it and cut it for you. For suppliers 25"x38" is a standard size. I'm in a large group of copyists/arrangers/composers who all go in to split a bulk order, but we've been using Finch Fine Ultra Smooth paper recently. Here's a link to available sizes:
http://www.finchpaper.com/stock-guide

Your supplier can cut one sheet of 25"x38" to yield exactly 8 sheets of 9.5"x12.5" without any waste. (Or even 4 sheets of 12.5"x19" if your printer will support it) I suspect that 9.5"x12.5" became a commonly used manuscript paper size for this reason.

[NeeraWM]

Unfortunately I am in the EU and A-based paper is so bad for printing music. They manage to do American size but all those I asked to said they need to cut A3 paper for that, such a waste!

Here is a couple of pages from a piece published with an EU-based editor. They are both from Popper's Cello Etudes. This staff size (which I won't say until after your judgment ) was the biggest I could manage to make music fit on two pages with a reasonably readable horizontal spacing. 7mm here was impossible (even if original prints like Hofmeister managed to, wonder how to reproduce those horizontal space settings).

Dossier de presentation - G-9.jpg (1.38 MiB) Viewed 6330 times

Dossier de presentation - G-3.jpg (1019.25 KiB) Viewed 6330 times

Page size is A4, with margins 8up 9down 10LR, as at the time we were following UE standards closely. This would be then reduced to 98.5% and printed on 232x305mm paper.

Please feel free to also comment on the engraving in general (this is from 2015 so I hope to have improved a bit in the meantime).

[John Ruggero]

The engraving is very nice.

Not too keen on the choice of fonts for the expressions and fingering, however. There are some places in the first example where I would have placed the fingering between the slurs and note heads rather than over the slur. Also extraneous triplet indications (m. 73-6 and 79 ex. 1) Some of this eats up white space.

[Fred G. Unn]

Personally, I think the intended use is one of the main factors in choosing a staff size. Is the ability to be sightread a priority? Is rehearsal time at a premium? Is there enough white space for markings/edits/cuts? Your top example seems too small and too densely spaced to me for an orchestral part. But it's not that, it's an etude so it's probably fine. Neither the ability to be sightread nor rehearsal time is a factor, while minimizing pages for publication is, so I imagine it works well.

It may be the publisher's house style so out of your control, but I agree with John on the typeface choice as I'm not really a fan of that sans serif font.

[Fred G. Unn]

Unfortunately I am in the EU and A-based paper is so bad for printing music. They manage to do American size but all those I asked to said they need to cut A3 paper for that, such a waste!

How easy is it to find B4 paper? At approx 9.8"x13.9" that could be a good starting point. Librarians probably aren't going to like the 13.9" side as it may extend past the top of the folders, but you could either cut that down manually with a paper trimmer, or order it from a supplier who could cut that in bulk.

[NeeraWM]

The engraving is very nice.

Thank you!

Not too keen on the choice of fonts for the expressions and fingering, however. There are some places in the first example where I would have placed the fingering between the slurs and note heads rather than over the slur. Also extraneous triplet indications (m. 73-6 and 79 ex. 1) Some of this eats up white space.

Indeed, those triplets indications should just not be there, they must have slipped proofreading. I also agree on fingering positions.
The font at the time was Tazzer Bold, then we switched to Taz by LucasFont regular, much thinner and in line with the Helsinki music font. Now the publisher has changed again to SourceSans, still sans serif, but a bit softer.

How easy is it to find B4 paper?

Let's say it is possible but it costs as much as A3 so printers prefer to take that in huge quantities and cut it down.