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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 dutifully export twenty or thirty cryptically named parts files onto your Desktop which would then need to be cleaned up and individually prepared for printing. Any subsequent changes to the score *also* required edits to one or more (or all) respective parts.
Today, parts are integrated within the score and the content is intelligently married. Sibelius calls its parts integration feature “Dynamic Parts“, while Finale labels their feature “Linked Parts“. In general, having scores and parts linked in one master file has proven to be a godsend, but there are some caveats.
Woodwind and brass instruments aren’t polyphonic. With some notable quality control exceptions in currently published music, common practice is to have one instrument per staff in the parts. Ideally, woodwind and brass players should not be required to locate their lines from within a divisi part.
At the same time, the better organized an orchestral score is, the more readable it becomes. Generally scores with fewer systems are easier to read. Quite often, the requirement is for pairs of instruments appearing on a single staff wherever possible: Clarinet 1 and 2 on a single staff, Horn 1 and 3 on a single staff and so on. For this tutorial, we’ll start with divisi or chorded staves in the score, and create individual parts from these.
Let’s take a look at how each program currently integrates score and parts, and some ways we can make Finale and Sibelius best work to our advantage despite any limitations.
Sibelius Word Menus
A useful, but often overlooked feature of Sibelius are Word Menus. Word Menus are built-in lists of useful words: terms, musical symbol text etc, available via contextual menu or keyboard shortcuts when you are entering various types of text.
Dolet 6 Music XML Plugins for Finale & Sibelius are now Freeware
Yup, that’s right: Just in time for Christmas, MakeMusic is offering the Dolet 6 Music XML plugin for both Finale and Sibelius on their website as a free download. Here’s the link:
http://www.makemusic.com/Products/MusicXML.aspx
Cool, right? But wait, what is a Sibelius plugin doing on the Finale website?
In case you missed the official announcement, on November 2, 2011, MakeMusic entered into an agreement to acquire selected assets of Recordare® LLC, the Internet music publishing and software company.
Under the terms of the agreement, MakeMusic purchased the MusicXML™ open format and Dolet® software technology, including copyrights, source code, and trademarks. MakeMusic also announced that the founder of Recordare and inventor of MusicXML, Michael Good, would join MakeMusic as the Director of Digital Sheet Music.
In case you want to read the official MakeMusic press releases, here they are:
Additionally, the Recordare site has more information about the future of Music XML.
Both Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 already have decent Music XML integration built in, allowing you to import and export Music XML files for collaboration with others, or, in the case of Finale, for back saving to a previous version of Finale.
The Dolet 6 plugins use the latest Music XML 3.0 technology, with support for additional musical symbols and lots of other goodies, so even Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 users will benefit. And, if you are using and earlier version of your notation software, such as Finale 2010 or Sibelius 6, it’s a huge step up, essentially giving users a comprehensive file exchange feature.
robert
Chords by the Numbers in Finale
UPDATED 9/27/11
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 the alterations.
For either the Handwritten or Engraved Styles, many chord suffixes are simple to enter, because you can just type in the suffix as you would any string of text, and as you do so, Finale creates the proper chord suffix. For instance, in the Handwritten Style, you can type in “Cmaj7″ or ”C7(b9)” and you’ll get nice looking chord symbols with the proper vertical alignment both suffixes:
Locating and Editing the Triangle Symbol for MA7 chords in Finale 2011
In Finale 2011, chord suffixes can be created by simply typing them in with the Chord tool. If every chord suffix library for Finale was the same, you could simply type in a standard keystroke for each suffix. However, depending on the library that is currently in use for the suffix, this isn’t always the case. For instance, some symbols, like the Triangle ∆ (Delta symbol) sometimes used for MA or MA7 chords isn’t an obvious keystroke. Furthermore, some chord fonts, such as the JazzCord font, are designed to display each suffix and any of its alterations using a single font character (e.g. “∆7″ isn’t two keystrokes in JazzCord, it is a single character).
To locate, display or edit these suffixes which can’t simply be typed in, and for which you don’t know the shortcut: enter the chord name without the suffix, (e.g. “C”) then right-click to select “Edit Chord Definition”. This will allow you to manually choose the chord suffix.
