Writing About Music

Repeat endings are complex shapes that can add a lot of clutter to your notation. Here are a few tips to make them behave.

Here’s a basic first and second ending, right out of the box from Finale. It starts off pretty good.

Certain details of the shape will vary between publishers. The numeral fonts might be different, for example. You might see some of the vertical lines extend all the way down to the bar line. The brackets might be shorter or longer, higher or lower. Some publishers will extend a hook coming down from the right corner of the second ending, so that the brackets look identical. I prefer the way shown, though, so that you can see your escape route.

The default is pretty close to what you generally see among music publishers. One change I’d make, though, is to add a little separation between the vertical lines between the two shapes. Out of the box, they are touching each other:

A little space gives more of sense of separation, like each ending is its own place:

The numerals should be the same distance from the top and the left edge. Sometimes, this gets out of whack, during the course of editing, particularly if things are being adjusted to accommodate notes and chord symbols.

In such cases, move the whole bracket up. Keep chord symbols inside of brackets, not above them. The general rule is to keep more intimate notation elements closer to the notes than the more distantly related ones. Chord symbols are more intimately connected to notes than brackets are, so keep them closer. To make room here, I moved the center lines a teeny tiny bit to the left.

If you have multiple staves, there’s no need to display the ending brackets on every staff of the score (though of course, every part needs them), and doing so adds a lot of clutter.

See how much cleaner the score looks with the brackets only on the top line? And their presence is noticed just fine, like this.