… music notation tips & tutorials by experts in this field.
A couple of years ago I was editing a piece of music and realized I was spending too much time and effort selecting objects with the mouse. In order to understand just how much of a problem that was, it’s useful to take a look at a sample page:
more >> “Find Next One of These – A Useful and Little Known Sibelius Plugin”
“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 refined look than the “flat“ or “straight“ quotes do. The difference is subtle, but appreciable.
You can enter these “smart quotes” on the fly in Finale, using the standard keystrokes recognized in Word and many other applications. On Mac, these are Option-[ for the curly start quote and Option-Shift-[ for the curly closing quote.
Presumably, on Windows the corresponding keystrokes are ALT-[ for the curly start quote and ALT-Shift-[ for the curly closing quote.
Sometimes, however, it would be nice to be able to quickly convert all existing quotes and apostrophes in a Finale score in a single operation. And, as it happens…
more >> “Convert Straight Quotes & Apostrophes to Smart Quotes via FinaleScript™”
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 every text character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
As of Finale 2012, it is possible on both Mac and Windows to show proper fraction characters as standalone text, or as part of technique instructions such as “1/2 section trem., 1/2 ord.” or “1/4 tone bend”. Here’s how:
As with any other text, you can copy the Unicode “½” or “¼” fraction characters seen on this page to the OS Clipboard and paste them into Finale 2012 Expressions. You don’t even have to memorize the keystrokes!
For future use, you could create a New Document Without Libraries, then create and save your fraction characters as a small Text Expression library for later import.
Many times, I receive Finale score files where the “fractions” are written out as a string of regular numerical characters and slashes, e.g. “1/2 section trem., 1/2 ord.” or “1/4 tone bend”. In these cases, it’s most efficient to simply replace all of the “one-slash-two” and “one-slash-four” text strings in one shot with the proper fraction characters.
This search and replace can be done globally in Finale 2012 with a simple Finalescript™ that references the proper Unicode characters.
Copy and paste following lines into a new Finalescript™ to convert these text strings to proper fraction symbols:
//start Finale script
process current doc
search "1/2" replace "½"
search "1/4" replace "¼"
search "3/4" replace "¾"
//end Finale script
The majority of modern fonts support these extended characters. If you find that the script does not work, it’s possible that the font you have chosen is too old to support the extended characters. Certainly the standard fonts that come with your OS, such as Times New Roman, Helvetica and so forth, will include the fraction characters.
The only thing you really need to watch for when running this script is Instrument Names. If the score uses slashes in Instrument names like “Trombone 1/2”, the instrument name will become “Trombone ½”. Typically, multiple instrument names should appear as “1 & 2”, “1, 2” or “1-2” so hopefully, this isn’t an issue.
If you are using Finale 2012, that’s it! That’s all there is to it!
~robert
Related : Creating Fractions & Other Symbols in Finale 2012 & Sibelius 7 using Unicode
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 where I’ve seen a number of interesting workarounds.
If you review typeset works by different publishers, you’ll discover there are several different concurrent standards for placing instrument names in a full score. My goal with this blog post is to show you the proper way to achieve these standard placements in Finale, and hopefully, ultimately save you some time in the bargain.
Q: I would like to convert all Instrument Change text to Boxed Text in a finished score in Sibelius 7. This would be useful in percussion parts where the player changes instruments quite often, from a Tam to a Suspended Cymbal to Castanets and so on.
Usually, changing a text style to another is done by first filter – selecting all occurrences of a specific text style, then selecting a new text style to change all of the selected text globally. However I can’t get it to work as I wish. What am I missing?
more >> “Instrument Change Text & Other Specialty Purpose Text Styles in Sibelius”
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 individual part extraction, or pasting parts into a separate template file.
Recently, a conversation with an industry colleague made me realize that even 6 years after the introduction of Linked Parts in Finale, some of the very best veteran professional music copyists working in LA and elsewhere still are not taking advantage of Finale’s Managed Parts feature.
more >> “Finale : Using Linked Parts, Finalescript & House Styles for Commercial Parts”
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 text has a bit of white space around it so there is no collision. Do you know of a way to do this?
The solution for this in both Finale and Sibelius is to define an enclosure or border area around the text (without a visible border line), then electronically “white-out” the background of the text within this enclosure. Here’s how:
more >> “Create White Space Where Text & Barlines Intersect In Finale & Sibelius”