Music staff paper, 7 mm staves

What this sheet is

Blank music manuscript paper for A4, 210 mm by 297 mm, ruled at a stave height of 7 mm. The sheet draws fifty lines. A stave is five of them, so that is ten staves down the page. Underneath, the engine sets the sheet out on a 7 mm module: twenty-seven across the writing area and thirty-nine down, 1,053 in all.

The ruling is centred in that writing area. Twenty-seven modules of 7 mm come to 189 mm of ruled width on a 210 mm sheet, and thirty-nine come to 273 mm on a 297 mm one. Whatever fraction of a module is left over once the whole ones have been counted is halved and split between the two margins, rather than being allowed to pile up against one edge, so the left and right margins match each other and the head and foot margins match each other.

The 7 mm is the stave, not the gap

This is the figure people misread, and it is worth being blunt about. A stave is five lines with four spaces between them, and the measurement quoted for manuscript paper is the height of the whole stave, bottom line to top line. At 7 mm, the space between one line and the next is therefore a quarter of that: 1.75 mm.

Read the 7 as the gap instead and the stave becomes 28 mm tall, four times the height it should be. A page ruled that way holds about three staves where this one holds ten, and it still looks entirely plausible until there is something to write on it. If you have set a stave height by hand somewhere and the result came out strangely sparse, that is almost always what happened.

The space left between one stave and the next is one and a half stave heights, which is 10.5 mm here. That is not padding. It is the room a copyist leaves for ledger lines above and below the stave, and for stems and beams that run past the outer lines. Close it up and the tall material of one system starts arriving in the next.

Printing it at true size

The single thing that goes wrong is the print dialogue. Left on Fit to page it rescales the sheet to whatever paper is in the tray, and the stave height goes with it. A4 sent to US Letter prints at 94.1%, which turns a 7 mm stave into about 6.59 mm and closes the 1.75 mm spaces to about 1.65 mm. Letter onto A4 prints at 97.3%. Neither is obvious on the page; it shows up when the sheet has to sit beside another one, or beside anything already written at 7 mm.

Set the dialogue to 100%, or Actual size, and turn page scaling off. Then check it rather than trusting it: a bar is printed in the foot margin with its length stated beside it, and a ruler laid along that bar settles the question in a second.

What else the bench will set

This sheet is one setting of a tool, not a fixed file. The stave height is yours to change, as is the paper: A4 at 210 by 297 mm, A5 at 148 by 210, US Letter at 215.9 by 279.4, Legal at 215.9 by 355.6. The sheet can be turned to landscape, which gives shorter, wider systems and fewer of them down the page. The ink is adjustable, so the staves can be printed light enough to write over in pencil without the ruling competing with the notes. A margin rule in red and a name-and-date line at the head can be switched on where the sheet is going to be filed rather than kept loose.