… music notation tips & tutorials by experts in this field.
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” ~Goethe
MakeMusic just announced the release of version 26.1 of Finale. This is a solid point release update which refines new features introduced since the initial release of Finale v26 in October of 2018 and earlier, and also squashes some bugs which were affecting productivity for some users, as well as improvements for MusicXML and SmartMusic.
Here’s a quick look:
MakeMusic’s Finale v26 update was released today. Their social media teasers over the last few weeks have contained the perfect buzzword for a guy like me: “productivity”.
(If you are new to Finale and anxious to get started, feel free to skip to the last paragraph of this review. Then, head over to MakeMusic to download the free 30 day trial and check it out for yourself.)
For the rest of us, I’ll cut to the chase: for me, by far the most compelling productivity feature in this upgrade is Finale’s reworked Articulation Tool, so let’s start there.
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 for specific text and replace it with something else. For example, you can quickly replace all occurrences of “1/2” with a proper “½” symbol:
This TSAR dialog also has a filter which allows you to selectively search a specific area of Finale; only replacing, say, a specific lyric spelling or a particular articulation character with another:
Which is great!
However, one thing which would make this search and replace a lot more powerful: The ability to SAVE and RECALL common search and replace commands somehow so you didn’t have to keep typing them in manually each time…
Q: I am studying the commercial template you created for Cinesamples and was wondering how you created those new tuplets in the Articulation part in the Engraving Rules in the Sibelius version of the template?
A: Sibelius has three user definable slots in the Articulations section of Edit Symbols (first two shown):
These correspond to the Custom Articulations 1, 2 and 3 in the fourth keypad in Sibelius, and show up in Engraving Rules > Articulations once defined.
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:
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 each part as well.
A: I typically start with the smallest elements and work my way out to the big ones. It’s important to make as many placement adjustments as you can in the score, because in doing so, you are also updating their relative positions in the parts (location changes to articulations, text or shapes made in the parts are *not* reflected in the score). I covered collision avoidance of staff text, dynamics and lines in my post from 10/31/11, so let’s talk about articulations . . .