Darcy James Argue shares basics of well-prepared lead sheets, scores, and parts from a jazz/big band perspective — so that you can communicate musical intent in the most clear, familiar, and unambiguous manner.
chord symbols
Be wise, resize, in Finale
Finale has a dedicated tool for resizing the noteheads, notes, staves, systems, or pages of your score. We’ll show you all the ways to use it, plus other ways to scale the size of items like accidentals, mid-measure clefs, grace notes, lyrics, and chord symbols.
Avid enters the AI fray with automatic chord symbol completion in Sibelius 2023.6
Sibelius 2023.6 introduces automatic chord symbol completion based on built-in AI technology and trained on several data sets of classical music. As you enter chord symbols, Sibelius will suggest the most likely chord based on the surrounding music.
Scoring Express jazz templates for Finale released; Sibelius and Dorico suites updated
The Scoring Express Jazz package of templates and libraries for Finale is now available, adding to the popular Chamber and Theatre & Studio packages, and bringing it on par with the versions already available for Sibelius and Dorico.
Dorico 4.3 brings Key Editor power tools and chord symbol note generation
Dorico 4.3 is out with more powerful controls in the Key Editor and a robust system for automatically generating notes on staves from chord symbols. There’s also improvements in the areas of engraving, note input, and editing, and the iPad version is updated, too.
PlayScore 2 adds text, lyrics, guitar chords, and more
The most recent updates to PlayScore 2 support lyrics, guitar chords, and multi-measure rests. A count-in feature, better rehearsal instrument support, and more improvements are also included. Plus, a preview of what’s to come.
Finale version 27.2 adds new jazz template, native Apple silicon support
Finale version 27.2 runs natively on Apple silicon Macs for the first time. All default documents and document styles in v27.2 are now SMuFL-based, and, in a welcome surprise, there is a fully revamped SMuFL-compliant jazz default file and document style.
Cooperating with chords in Finale
A complete video tutorial series on everything to do with chord symbols in Finale. Manual input, MIDI input, staff analysis, chord definition, alternate and capo chords, suffix editing, fretboards, positioning, styles, document options, and playback — it’s all here!
Customize chord symbol suffixes in Sibelius
If you have found yourself stymied in your quest for the One True Way when customizing your chord symbol suffixes in Sibelius, we can help. Chord symbols are highly customizable — you just need to know where to look and understand how it works.
MusFrets, a font for chord diagrams
From the creator of MusGlyphs and MusAnalysis comes MusFrets — a text font that allows the user to type guitar chord diagrams into a word processor or other software.