Making efficient use of Linked Parts in Finale
It baffles me that there are still a number of commercial Music Copying Houses in LA, New York and elsewhere that are still not taking advantage of the benefits of…
More advanced alternate notation techniques in Finale
Typically, a score and its parts show identical information. Sometimes, however, it is necessary for the score and parts to show the same notation in different ways. A transposing part…
Finale & Sibelius – controlling text visibility between score & parts
In observing the steps people go through to change visibility of text between score and parts in both Finale and Sibelius, I thought a short tutorial post on the subject…
Creating and using text inserts in Finale
Finale has a very useful feature for automating the display of text called Text Inserts. These text inserts, which are a type of placeholder text sometimes referred to as Wildcards or…
Finale – type harp pedal markings as text into your score
Q: “In Finale, I have notated the starting and ending notes of a gliss which is in C minor. The full version of TGTOOLS has the Harp Pedaling… plugin, but…
Chord symbols by the numbers in Finale
If you are like me, you may have trouble remembering some of the keystrokes required to enter certain chord symbols into Finale, especially when you start getting into some of…
Creating a new score from transposed parts in Finale or Sibelius
Q: I’ve got a chart with just the parts and I’m re-constructing a score. I want to enter the notes as they are without going through transposing. Is there a…
Halving or doubling rhythmic values in Sibelius & Finale
Q: A student of mine has created a .MID file and imported it into Finale 2011. However, all the note values are twice the length she desires. How can she make…
Collision avoidance in Finale, part 1 : The little things
Q: What method(s) do you use to avoid collisions in “busy” scores in Finale, i.e: a tutti section with dynamics, hairpins, accents, chord symbols, etc… I have messed with the…
Take control of multirests in Sibelius and Finale
Let’s talk about rests. Multimeasure Rests, that is. You may not have given them much thought, but Multimeasure Rests play a key role in how your parts look. In this…
Finale Score Manager & mid-score instrument changes
Before Finale 2012, setting up a staff to be fully defined as a particular instrument was a tedious process. First of all, playback was completely separated from the visual definition…
Controlling part name visibility using text inserts in Finale
Q: I am having a weird issue with Finale where the part names aren’t showing up in parts (Flute 1 etc.). Any new text I write to create instrument names…
Controlling the layout when using the Finale score merger. . .
Q: I have several short pieces for brass quintet which I have merged together using Finale’s ScoreMerger feature. The pieces are all appended in the correct order, but each short…
Creating fractions & other symbols in Finale & Sibelius using Unicode
U·ni·code noun /ˈyo͞oniˌkōd/ An international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique numeric value that applies across…
Creating tone clusters in Finale, part 1
Q: Sometimes I need to notate cluster notes (tone clusters). But the Finale software doesn’t seem to support these. How can I create them? A: Finale allows you to notate…
Finale collision avoidance part 2 : Articulations
Q: How do you avoid collisions in Finale, i.e: dynamics, hairpins, accents, chord symbols, etc.? I end up manually moving a lot of stuff, and then I have to manually adjust…
Finale collision avoidance, part 3 : Dynamics
Tip: When entering dynamics with hairpins in Finale, enter the dynamics first, then the hairpins. The reason for this is that the text dynamics locations will help you determine the…
Creating aleatoric temporal boxed notation in Finale
Q: I would like to use Finale to notate the contemporary avant-garde works I am composing. In a score with a number of instruments, How do I encapsulate a series…
Aleatoric elements : From boxed to out of the box notation in Finale
Music that supplies only the pitches while directing the players to improvise the rhythms freely is a common (partly) aleatoric device which gives the composer a desired degree of control…
Five tips to improve your workflow in Finale
If you are like me, you’re interested in working more efficiently. Here are 5 tips to improve your workflow in recent versions of Finale: (more…)
Finale tip : Quickly delete duplicate unison notes in the same layer
A PRIME NON-SEQUITUR Jack Butler: “Gonna rip these walls out and, uh, of course re-wire it.” Ron Richardson: “Yeah, you gonna make it all 220?” Jack Butler: “Yeah, 220, 221.…
One step text multi-copy shortcuts in Finale
The following Text Expression multi-copy shortcuts for Finale 2011 or later do not work with System / Score text Categories (e.g. Tempo Marks, Tempo Alterations and Rehearsal Marks), however, they can…
Finale text sized, placed & styled – Document Options & the Category Designer
There are two main requirements for managing Text in any notation program. First, we want to be able to define in advance how the musical and text elements will look,…
Change stubborn text in Finale quickly, easily & globally with Finale script
In “Finale Text Sized, Placed & Styled – Document Options & the Category Designer“, we looked at how we can set up a Finale document’s overall font choices using the…
Understanding & improving music spacing in Finale and Sibelius
Note spacing on the computer is basically achieved by a mathematical formula. But music spacing is more than just notes – at any point in time, it’s a complex pairing…
On location : Finale & Sibelius rehearsal marks
“From the top ?” . . . Image source : “The Art of Music Engraving and Processing” by Ted Ross “Thanks for the great rehearsal marks!” isn’t the type of…
On location : Number repeated measures in Finale & Sibelius
When the same bar of music is repeated over and over, it’s common to indicate the the repeated pattern in subsequent bars using a single bar repeat sign, notated with…
Keep it together in Finale or Sibelius : Score & parts in the same file
In the early days of Finale and Sibelius, individual parts were generated from a master score via a painful and aptly named process referred to as “Extraction”. The programs would…
Create a divisi or chorded instrument from two separate staves
In my post “Keep it Together in Finale or Sibelius : Score & Parts in the same file“, we looked at methods of exploding chorded or divisi parts in the…
Articulation alternatives for staggered bowing in Finale and Sibelius
Bowings are a type of symbol used in music notation to indicate the use of the bow in string parts, which indicate the manner in which a note should be…
Aligning piano pedaling & other Smart Lines in Finale
Q: I would like to be able to ‘automatically’ align piano pedal markings horizontally in my scores. The TG tool appears to be useless when it comes to these. A: There…
Centered dynamics between staves on braced grand staff instruments
Q: I can never get the placement of dynamics to align nicely to the middle of the grand staff in piano parts. Because they are connected to the treble or…
Bar number flexibility for score & parts in Finale & Sibelius
In both Finale and Sibelius, one simple and common way to separately control bar number size, location and frequency is to save off a separate copy of the final score…
Finale special tools : Double / split stem tool
Frequently, in orchestral scores, 2 woodwind or brass parts are shared on the same staff. The staff may contain a mixture of divisi and unison notes. Normally, if the two…
Page numbering in Finale & Sibelius : Ranges : X of Y
This tutorial was updated 9/26/12. Question: A client wants the page numbering to read, page 2 of 7, page 3 of 7, etc., for pdf downloads of some piano pieces…
Finale chord symbol spacing
Question: I was wondering if you’ve found a quick way to get a little bit more space around chord symbols in Finale. I keep having to correct the width of…
Create white space where text & barlines intersect in Finale & Sibelius
Question: I’m trying to create dynamic markings or other text over bar lines between staves. In the example above, the organ registration text appears “in front” of the bar line. The…
Finale : Feathered beams in cross-staff notation
Feathered Beams in Finale are straightforward to create in a single staff (see this tutorial). However, creating feathered beams in a grand staff with cross-staff notation is a little more…
Realization reversed : From performance to the page
Western music notation is a fixed set of rules devised for expressing something that, by nature, is not fixed. Our current notation system has been culled and pruned over the last several centuries from…
Finale : Using Linked Parts, FinaleScript & House Styles for commercial parts
Back in 2011, I posted Making Efficient Use of Linked Parts In Finale which outlined a few of the advantages of using Linked Parts in Finale vs. the “old school” method of…
Expressive rubato to massive grooves : Ensemble playback that sings & swings
Subtle differences in the timing, volume and duration of phrases are what gives music its “feel” – to inject more tension or weight; to make it more emotional and exciting.…
Vertical spacing of staves and systems in Finale
Q: I’m working on an orchestral score in Finale, and I’m having some trouble with the vertical staff spacing. Is there something like the Space Systems evenly tool, but for…
JW meter & rhythm plugin for Finale
Related: Featured Finale Plugin: JW Meter & Rhythm If you are a composer or arranger, whether you are working in Finale 26, or still working in Finale 2010, you’ll want to download…
Instrument name positioning in Finale
As a professional music copyist, I’m always interested in the alternate solutions and workarounds that composers and arrangers use in Finale to achieve specific tasks. Instrument names is an area…
Controlling symbols, hooks & dashed extension lines in Sibelius & Finale
Q: I am currently studying Elaine Gould’s “Behind Bars” and on page 30 she states: “Terminate the octave transposition with a corner”. In Finale, octave lines seem to automatically end with…
Vertical spacing between staves in a score & working @ 100%
Q: What is the ideal space between staves in a score? I know this can vary but I would like to make the systems as big as possible without too much…
Finale note spacing, beat spacing, beat groups & time signature spacing
Q: I am using Finale 2011, and I am having a music spacing issue. If I am inputting beamed notes, and add an accidental, the space between that note and…
Staying organized with Finale’s Category Designer
Q: I have a Finale template file that I use often for orchestral music, and I have created several new expression categories with the Category Designer tool. However, I created…
Finale : Cross-layer accidental positioning
Q: In a score where two instruments share a single staff (in my example, Horn 1 and 2), I have an issue when it comes to accidentals. Here is a picture…
A simple FinaleScript™ for fractions in Finale 2012
One often overlooked but very important “under the hood” feature of Finale 2012 is its full support for the Unicode text standard. What is Unicode? Unicode provides a unique number for…
Convert straight quotes & apostrophes to Smart Quotes via FinaleScript™
“Smart”, or curly quotes are in common use in published works of all types, including books, music and even modern web sites. For music scores, these “smart quotes” give a more…
A simple FinaleScript™ to create rhythm cues in drum parts
Frequently, in jazz charts, drum parts are written with rhythm cues included so the drummer can catch specific accents and phrases the band is playing. These cues might look something…
Octave-displaced staves in concert scores with transposed parts in Finale
Before reading this article, please see: Concert Pitch, Transposing and Octave Displaced Instruments : A Prelude. Instruments which are not considered “transposed” per se, but written in a different octave…
Finale : Six of one ; ½ dozen of the other – the simplify key conundrum
When working with scores in keys of four sharps or more, it’s frequently desirable for transposing instruments such as Bb Clarinet or Trumpet to show their respective transpositions in flat…
A Finale tip when working with older files
I recently received this helpful tip from Beth Varela, MakeMusic’s Digital Marketing Manager I thought was worth sharing: “When I need to open files originally created in a much earlier…
Create parenthesized or bracketed hairpins in Finale
Finale has a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating Custom Smart Shapes. You can create a line shape of any thickness, make it solid, dotted, dashed or even…
Finale quick tip : Note-attached custom Smart Lines
To make Custom Smart Lines note-attach like the preset ones in Finale, Option-Click (Mac) or Alt-Click (Win) the Tab Slide Tool: (more…)
Finale quick tip : Fix frozen ties in managed voices
Sometimes in Finale, particularly in older scores which have been updated , ties on notes in secondary layers can get “frozen”. The ties in both Layers look normal in the score: ..but in…
Finale quick tip : Number beats for rhythmic exercises
If you are a music educator teaching the fundamentals of rhythm, from time to time, you may find the need to count out beat numbers over the notation to help indicate various rhythms…
Finale quick tip : Defining articulation playback
If you’ve ever opened Finale’s Articulation Designer (Opt.-Click or Alt.-Click on the Articulation tool to open the dialog), you have probably seen the “Playback Effect” settings: (more…)
Finale quick tip : Create an opaque enclosure (mask) for text
Sometimes in Finale, it is desirable to place text in the foreground over a line. One common usage is for a text instruction in the center of a hairpin: Another common…
Finale quick tip : Change measurement units on the fly
Finale supports six+ different units of measurement : Inches Centimeters Points Picas Spaces EVPUs (Enigma Virtual Page Units) While Millimeters aren’t specifically listed as an available unit of measurement in…
Finale quick tip : Divisi stems up, stems, down
It used to be that in Finale, if you wanted divisi stems up / down, you had to enter (or re-enter) each part in as a separate Layer in two…
Finale quick tip : Align hairpins and other Smart Lines
The Contextual Menu for Smart Shapes makes quick work of aligning hairpins, trills and other measure – attached smart lines in your score. For instance, to align trills so their…
Finale quick tip : Chord symbol playback
Chord symbols in Finale can play back, should you want them to. To turn on Chord Symbol playback, select the Chord tool, then make sure Enable Chord Playback is checked in the Chord menu.…
Finale quick tip : Use MIDI input to create chord symbols
Did you know that you can enter chords on your MIDI keyboard to create Chord Symbols over the staff? If you would like Finale to recognize MIDI entry to generate chord symbols, choose…
Music spacing between layers in Finale
Q: In this screenshot, you’ll notice that the G natural accidental in the third bar is colliding with the previous F sixteenth note between the two layers: I have tried…
Finale : Automated bar numbers & instrument family group brackets
Q: We just came across something that seems to be a major annoyance in Finale. We had never run into it before because we usually start from a Document Style with the Setup Wizard, rather than…
Finale : Vertical placement of bar numbers, part 2
Q: When preparing a musical theater orchestration, one of the “parts” I want to extract is actually a Piano/Vocal score, which has the piano staff and all the vocal staves.…
Understanding & controlling staff height (size) in Finale
I thought it might be good to devote some time to reviewing Finale’s Staff Height (Size) controls, since this seems to be a misunderstood area of the program. There is…
Finale quick tip : Smart word extensions @ double barlines
In vocal music, single syllables of text which span several different notes in succession are shown with horizontal lines, called Word Extensions, or Lyric Extensions. The technical name for these vocal…
Finale’s Managed Parts & grace note spacing
Q: I’m composing a piece for full orchestra plus large percussion ensemble / steel band). In order to save space, I’m using shared staves for most of the winds (two…
Create simple vertical group names in Finale
Simple Vertical Group Names I was recently asked to create a score layout that evoked some old Hollywood styles. One of the aspects discussed was a different way of formatting…
Display instrument names differently between score & parts in Finale
There is a visual style preferred by many composers and orchestrators in which instrument group names are shown bracketing two or more staves, with numbers (1., 2. or I., II.) rather than individual instrument names…
Finale: Tricks with “Specify Voicing” in Managed Parts
The Specify Voicing feature in Finale’s Managed Parts can be a powerful timesaver once you come to terms with its quirks and limitations. Specify Voicing gives you options for splitting…
Finale concert scores @ written pitch : Using nonstandard key signatures
This post builds on concepts presented in these previous tutorials: Concert Pitch, Transposing and Octave-Displaced Instruments: A Prelude Octave-Displaced Staves in Concert Scores with Transposed Parts in Finale Finale’s Clef…
Create drop shadow enclosures for rehearsal marks in Finale
In graphic design, a drop shadow is a visual effect consisting of a drawing element which looks like the shadow of an object, giving the impression that the object is…
Finale : Change the page size of all of your parts in one edit
There is a quick way to change the page size of all of your parts in one edit operation within Finale. Here’s how: (more…)
Hide cautionary key & time signatures in Finale
Q: I’m creating very simple exercise sheets in Finale; scales and so forth. But I don’t know how to end one scale and go to the next key as a…
Finale : Cross staff notation with more than two staves
Q: I want to have notes move across 3 manuals (3 staves) using cross staves, with a sequence of individual notes going from bottom to top and back. Easy to do…
Finale 25 plugin : JW Yada Yada tremolo (v2)
see also: Finale Plugin: Yada Tremolo version 2.01 Finale users finally have access to this great productivity tool (again) in Finale 25 with the release of a new, 64 bit…
Finale plugin : Yada tremolo version 2.01
Hot on the heels of the release of JW Yada Yada Tremolo for Finale 25 is a new version 2.01, which addresses some limitations of the first release: Supports percussion…
Finale tip : Use layers to highlight specific noteheads
Q: I’m creating instructional handouts for students in Finale. Is there a way to color / highlight specific noteheads? Here’s an example, where I’m trying to show the student how…
Finale’s text tool : On-page alignment
SibeliusBlog author Philip Rothman recently wrote a helpful article on formatting title pages in Finale. While reading the article, I was reminded that while formatting music notation is very advanced…
FinaleScript™ tip : Search and replace
More recent versions of Finale have a powerful tool called Text Search and Replace (TSAR), found in the Edit Menu: As the name implies, from this dialog you can search…
Finale: A simple trick for misbehaving measure number regions
I was just working as a proofreader on a recording project, and the cue I was looking at was supposed to start with measure 6. I noticed that it was…
Rebarring in Finale : 5/4 Becomes 3/4+2/4
Q: Here’s the “easy” problem: I have a score in 5/4. It’s always the same grouping 3/4 + 2/4. I would like to convert all the 5/4 measures into two…
Beyond defaults : Create ½, whole-tone, flat, natural & sharp trill lines in Finale
There are a couple of common approaches for indicating trills with specific trill-to pitches in your music score. One way is to indicate the trill-to pitch as a stemless, cue sized…
Beyond defaults : Take control of note spacing in Finale
Music spacing (historically referred to as “punctuation”) is controlled by a mathematical ratio in Finale. At any point in time, this equation determines the horizontal placement of notes and related…
Instrument changes using 3rd party libraries in Finale later than 2012
This tutorial shows how to use “change instrument” to get correct instrument changes for playback when using available 3rd party ARIA libraries in Finale 2012 and later. (more…)
Create lead / top line chord notation for rock, jazz & pop charts in Finale
Lead Line Chord Notation, also referred to as Topline Notation is a shorthand notation convention that is sometimes used for rock, jazz and pop guitar or keyboard charts. Lead Line…
Understanding Finale’s Category Designer
Q: I created a “Custom” category of expressions, and exported the library to disk. When I load the library with an older Finale file, it adds the category. However, when…
Create narrow h-bar multirests in Finale
Multirests are a key House Style element of all printed music. Multi-measure rests have evolved over time. The style of multimeasure rest currently in favor is called an “H-bar”. (more…)
Finale 27 – Symbol Select for expressions, Smart Lines, and more
Finale 27 introduced a powerful new feature that is easy to overlook, especially since MakeMusic hasn’t mentioned it in any of their marketing materials. In almost every place you can…
Automating Finale for Windows
A frequent question for Windows users of Finale is if there is any equivalent to Keyboard Maestro, the popular macro utility for MacOS. Unfortunately the answer is no: There is…