Tutorial 8: Other Notation Topics

In this section you’ll learn to use some of Finale’s most powerful scoring and notation tools.

The Special Tools Tool: Fancy Beaming and Stemming

The Special Tools Tool provides you with fine-tuning control over spacing, beaming, ties, dots, and stems.

• Open the tutorial document called “Tutorial 8.” A piece for flute and piano appears on the screen. Since you’ll be jumping around quite a bit in this tutorial, you may prefer to work in Scroll View.
• From the View Menu, select Scroll View. Scroll to measure 1.
• On Windows, click on the Window Menu and choose Advanced Tools Palette.
• Click the Special Tools Tool  . The Special Tools palette appears as a toolbar on the right side of the screen, containing 18 tool icons, each of which controls some aspect of the music. (This palette is just like the others you’ve encountered: You can hide it or turn it into a floating palette.)

Using the Special Tools tool, you can edit one measure of music at a time. To edit any of the above-listed musical elements, click the appropriate tool on the palette, then click the measure you want to edit. Finale will normally display a small square handle on each note, stem, accidental, beam, tie, or dot (depending on which tool you’re using—to hide these handles, deselect Show Handles in the Special Tools Menu). Select the handle or handles of the elements you want to manipulate, and perform the desired action. (You select multiple handles by drag-enclosing or -clicking.)

For a complete discussion of all Special Tools functions, consult the User Manual under Special Tools. For now, let’s try some experiments.

• Click the Note Position Tool , if it’s not already selected.  
• Click the first measure of the middle staff.
• Drag any note’s handle left or right. You can move any note, chord, or rest horizontally with this tool, without affecting its playback. Of course, it’s easier to simply drag notes left or right using the Speedy Entry Tool.
• Click the Notehead Position Tool . Every notehead in the measure sprouts a handle. (Once you have selected a measure with a Special Tool, Finale assumes you are continuing to work on that measure until you tell it differently. You could click another measure to select it.)
• Drag any handle left or right. Because the Notehead Position Tool lets you move individual noteheads, you could, for example, use it to rearrange the notehead configuration of a cluster chord.

You can also change a notehead’s appearance:

• Click the Note Shape Tool , and double-click a note’s handle. The Symbol Selection dialog box appears, containing every possible symbol in the Maestro font. You can double-click any shape in this palette, and it will replace the normal oval notehead of the note you clicked. Using this technique, you can create X noteheads, diamond noteheads, triangle noteheads, or any other special notehead.
• Double-click the X symbol (slot 192). The notehead has been replaced by the X, although it’s obscured by its handle.
• From the Special Tools Menu, choose Show Handles to uncheck it. By turning off Show Handles, you make the handles invisible. Now you can see the new notehead. (When Show Handles isn’t selected, you can still use the Special Tools; just click where a handle would be if it were visible.)
• If you want to change noteheads for all notes in a region of your score, choose the Selection Tool, select the region, and from the Utilities Menu, choose Change, Noteheads.

Note, by the way, that this technique is best for occasional notehead shape changes. If you plan to create a rhythm part in which most of the noteheads are X’s or slashes, use the Staff Styles feature (see Staff Styles in the User Manual). You can also tell Finale where you want the stem to attach to one of these nonstandard noteheads. See Stem Connections dialog box in the User Manual.

Let’s try some other experiments.

• Choose Show Handles in the Special Tools Menu again. The handles reappear.
• Click the Accidental Mover Tool  . Every accidental in the measure now has a handle. Experiment with dragging these handles—you can slide any accidental horizontally. This would be useful if you wanted to rearrange the accidentals on a cluster chord, for example. To drag the accidental vertically, double-click on the handle. In the Accidental Settings dialog box, check Allow Vertical Positioning. You might use this feature for creating musica ficta, where the accidental appears above the note. Click Cancel to return to the score.
• Click the Stem Length Tool . Any note with an unbeamed stem sprouts two handles which you can drag up or down to change the stem’s length. (In this example, the handles below the notes control the stem for the note if it were to be flipped in the opposite direction.) Try lengthening the stem of the second quarter note in the measure. Remember that in order to constrain the cursor to perfectly vertical (or horizontal) movement, press d while dragging.
• The next tool, the Broken Beam Tool , is what you use to change the direction of a sixteenth-note (or smaller) beam “stub,” as shown here:

• Click the Stem Direction Tool . A handle appears above and below every note in the measure. A click on any handle flips the stem in its direction—and “freezes” the stem that way (hence the snowflake icon), even if the piece gets transposed. Click the handle again to restore the note to “floating” status. (Of course, it’s easier to flip stems with the Simple or Speedy Entry Tool. Position the insertion bar on a note and press the L key to freeze its stem in the opposite direction, or !-L (Mac: b-L) to restore the stem to its “floating” status. Note that the keystroke may be different if you have edited the Simple Entry keyboard shortcuts.)
• Click the Double/Split Stem Tool . When you click this tool, a handle appears on every notehead in the measure; another appears above the staff, and another below. Click the lower handle of a note or chord to create double stemming:

Try it now:

• Click the lower handle of each of the sixteenth notes in the piano part. The new, second stem always points in the opposite direction from the original stem, no matter which handle (top or bottom) you clicked.

The note handles provide an additional feature. They can produce split stemming within a chord, giving the effect of a separate inner voice, like this:

There are two steps to creating this effect: First, click the bottom stem to let Finale know you want to create split stemming. Then click the handle of each note you want to be a part of the upper stem only.

• Click the upper notehead handle of each sixteenth-note chord. Deselect Show Handles (in the Special Tools Menu) to hide the handles for a moment. You can see that you’ve made the sixteenth notes appear to be stemmed separately. Select Show Handles again to restore the handles.

You may not use the next two tools as frequently, but it’s a good idea to keep their functions in mind; feel free to experiment as you read. The Reverse Stem Tool F simply flips the stem from one side of its notehead to the other, a function that may be useful in conjunction with cross-staff notes.

The Custom Stem Tool provides great flexibility in special beaming cases—for example, splayed beaming, where three mini-stems connect a C flat, C natural, C sharp chord cluster. That’s only one function of the Custom Stem Tool. If you double-click a note’s handle, you’ll enter the Shape Selection dialog box, from which you can select a different shape (or create a new shape with the Shape Designer, covered later in this tutorial) to use as a stem. See Stems in the User Manual for full instructions in the use of these tools.

For a single stemless note, change the stem to a blank shape with the Custom Stem Tool.

• Click the first measure of the top staff, then click the Beam Angle Tool  . Any notes that are beamed together sprout two handles, one at each end of the beam. The right handle changes the beam angle; as you move it up and down, the left handle remains stationary. The left handle changes the beam height; as you move it up or down, the right handle moves in tandem, and the beam angle doesn’t change.

Try it now: drag the right and left handles of the beam on the pair of eighth notes at the end of the measure.

Five tools provide additional control over beaming. For example, the Secondary Beam Break Tool   lets you specify places where you’d like secondary beams (sixteenths, 32nds, and so on) to break. The Beam Extension Tool   simply extends any beam past its last note. And there’s also a Secondary Beam Angle Tool   that lets you give sixteenth-note (and lower) beams different slants. This tool is useful for creating the modern feathered beaming notation of accelerandi and ritards, where several secondary beams converge. The Beam Width Tool   lets you change the thickness of beams themselves; and the Beam Stem Adjust Tool   allows you to adjust the length of stems within beamed notes. For a more complete discussion of these tools, see Special Tools in the User Manual.

• Click the second measure of the middle staff.
• Click the Tie Tool  . Four Handles appear on the tie. You can click and drag these handles to adjust the tie shape manually.
• Double-click the tie’s left handle. The Tie Alterations dialog box appears. This dialog box allows you to change the appearance and placement of individual ties in the score.

The Tie Placement Controls allow you to affect the vertical and horizontal points at which the tie starts and ends. The Tie Control Points offer you control over the shape of the tie. Note that under Tie Direction, Automatic is the default setting. This means that Finale decides which direction the tie should appear based on your settings in the Tie Options dialog box. For more details, see Tie Alterations dialog box in the User Manual.

To flip a tie with the Tie Tool, select the tie’s handle and hit -F (Mac: -F)

• Click Cancel.
• Click the Dot Tool  . Double-click the first dotted note’s handle. The Dot Offsets dialog box appears, where you can specify the precise positioning of this dot. (This tool is best for making changes to specific dotted notes. You can set the horizontal dot positioning globally, too; see Dotted Notes in the User Manual.)

The H offset is the horizontal distance between the dot and its default placement (a higher value means farther to the right); the V offset sets the vertical location of the dot relative to its default placement (a higher value means upward); the Inter-Dot Spacing sets the distance between the dots of a note with several dots. For example, if you decide that a dot should be moved down to the next space on the staff, add –.083 (inches) to the V offset. (You can determine which measurement units are used in most Finale text boxes. From the Edit Menu, choose Measurement Units.)

• Click Cancel. As you have just seen, the two previous tools have dialog boxes associated with them, in which you can control the positioning of the specified elements very precisely. However, you can also simply drag any handle that appears, as you would with all of the other Special Tools.

If you don’t like what you’ve done, click the handle of the affected element (to select it), and press or . You can also erase Special Tools modifications on a global basis: Select the desired region with the Selection Tool. From the Edit Menu, choose Clear Selected Items. Click Uncheck All. Now specify the Special Tools alterations you want erased, according to the following table:

You can remove changes you’ve made with the Stem Direction, Double/Split Stem, and Reverse Stem tools using a slightly different method. Select the desired region with the Selection Tool. From the Utilities Menu, choose Utilities, then Use Default Direction.

Measure Numbers

In the real world, measures are sometimes numbered A, B, C, and D. Sometimes people cut sections out of music, resulting in a measure numbering sequence like 52, 53, 70. Other times music is inserted, and the bars are called 33a, 33b, 33c. For these situations, Finale can create several different numbering systems, one for each region of a piece.

In this example, however, you’ll simply number every measure sequentially. You’ll be using the Measure Tool.

• Click the Measure Tool  . From the Measure Menu, choose Edit Measure Number Regions. The Measure Number dialog box appears.

The text box at the top of this dialog box is currently empty, indicating that no measure number regions have been defined for this document. (The Tutorial 8.MUS file, that is. New default documents have a single measure number region by default starting with the first measure.)

• Click Add. Finale creates a measure number region, Region 1, encompassing measures 1 through 999. (There aren't anywhere near 999 measures in this document, but we’ve entered a very high number to make sure that all the measures you do have are included in this region.)
• Click Set Font and choose Arial 9 point. Click OK to exit the Font dialog box. You can set the font and size independently for each region.
• Click Position. The Position Measure Number dialog box appears, letting you set the position of the number relative to the beginning of the measure.

• Drag the number into place just below and to the right of the barline. You don’t have to drag the 0 itself. You can drag anywhere within the display.
• Click OK. All that remains is to tell Finale how often you want the numbers to appear. If you select Show Measure Numbers at Start of Staff System (the default), numbers will only appear on measures that begin new systems. To make our changes easier to see, though, we’ll number every measure.
• Click the radio button for Show Every __ Measures Beginning with Measure __. Make sure 1 is entered into both text boxes.
• Click OK. You’ve now numbered all the measures, but they appear over every staff. In a piano-and-solo score like the one in this tutorial, the score might look best if they only appeared once below the solo staff.
• Click the Staff Tool  ; double-click any measure in the middle staff. The Staff Attributes dialog box for this staff appears.
• In the Items to Display section, uncheck Measure Numbers. From the Staff drop-down list at the top of the Staff Attributes dialog box, choose [Staff 3] (to advance to the bottom staff) and click Measure Numbers again. Click OK. You’ve just told Finale not to draw the measure numbers under the piano staves. They now appear only under the top staff.

If you want to add another region, or if you want to change some aspects of the numbering for this one, return to the Measure Number dialog box. For more details, see Measure Numbers in the User Manual.

The Shape Designer

Every now and then, you’ll run across a musical situation for which there’s no standard notation. Maybe you’ll want to insert a diagram into your score for harp pedaling, or musical-theatre staging, or an unusual instrument posture. For those situations, as well as for modern, alternative-notation scores, Finale has a built-in drawing program called the Shape Designer. You visited the Shape Designer in the previous tutorial, but this time you’ll really find out what it can do.

To acquaint you with its features, in this exercise you’ll create a special diagram as part of a note to your flutist.

• Scroll to measure 20.
• Click the Expression Tool   and double-click above measure 20. The Expression Selection dialog box appears.
• Click Create. The Expression Designer dialog box appears.
• Click the Shape radio button and then click Create. You arrive in the Shape Designer.

At the top of the window are twelve drawing tools.

Let’s say that you want a special effect—you want the flute rotated 90 degrees and played vertically.

In the steps below, the units shown in the H: (horizontal coordinate) and V: (vertical coordinate) text boxes are measured in points (72 per inch).

• From the Shape Designer Menu, choose “Rulers and Grid.” The Rulers and Grid dialog box appears.
• Click Points, then click OK. You’ve just set the measurement units to Points.
• If no grid points appear in the drawing area, from the Shape Designer Menu, choose Show, and then Grid. Grid points now appear in the Shape Designer drawing area.
• From the View drop-down list, choose 200%. Everything on the screen now appears twice the size it will be in the score.
• Click the Rectangle Tool  . You’re about to draw a tall thin rectangle that will represent the flute itself.
• Starting on the origin, click and drag straight up and to the right until H: is about 4 and V: is about 36. Release the mouse button. The origin is the small white circle at the center of the screen. You drew a rectangle, all right, but it’s too thick to look like a flute. That’s easily remedied:

• Click the Selection Tool  , and then click the “flute” rectangle. Black handles appear. From the Shape Designer Menu, choose Line Thickness then choose Hairline. “Hairline” thickness is .25 points.

In the next step, you’ll create a curved arrow to indicate that you want a rotation.

• Click the Curve Tool  . Starting to the right of the rectangle, click and drag down and to the right to create a curve. A shallow, downward-arcing curve appears. (If you had dragged to the left, you would have created an upward arc.)

• Click the Selection Tool  . Click on the curve that was just created. Three handles appear that govern the positions of the curve’s endpoints and the arc of the curve itself. Drag these handles until the curve looks like this:

To change its line thickness, click the line once and then, from the Shape Designer Menu, choose Line Thickness and then select a different thickness.

Next, you’ll add an arrowhead to the curve.

• With the curve still selected, click on the Shape Designer menu and choose Arrowheads. The Arrowheads dialog box appears. We want to add an arrow to the start of our curve.
• Click on the drop-down menu next to Start and select Preset Arrowhead. In the Preset Arrowhead Selection dialog box, click on Select to choose the first arrowhead. Click OK.

If you want to preserve the spatial relationship between the curve and the rectangle, you can group them into a single unit. With the Selection Tool, click one object, then -click the other. From the Shape Designer Menu, choose Group. From now on, these two objects will be locked together as though they’re a single object—until you choose Ungroup from the Shape Designer Menu, of course.

As a final step, make a textual notation to the hapless flutist:

• Click the Text Tool  . Click to the left of the “flute,” and type “Tilt flute straight up.”

• If you want the text to wrap onto two lines, as shown above, press after the first two words. To change the type style, select the entire text block using the Selection Tool, and choose Select Font from the Shape Designer Menu.
• While pressing (Mac: ), click OK. You return to the score, where your special diagram appears near the measure you clicked. Drag its handle to adjust its position.

You may not have much everyday need for the vertical-flute shape you just drew. But the Shape Designer will come in handy for creating doits, harp diagrams, enclosures, logos, and other special notational cases. For more information on using the Shape Designer, see Shape Designer in the User Manual.

Scanning Music

Finale offers a variety of ways for you to scan sheet music and bring the results into Finale. You can bring your scanned files into Musitek’s MIDISCAN or SmartScore software, then import the resulting files into Finale. Or, you could directly acquire sheet music from your scanner, and translate it to a Finale file using built-in SmartScore technology. The SmartScore Lite feature in Finale, like many music scanning products, doesn’t recognize articulation marks, hairpins, double or repeat barlines, or text. It will recognize 3 accidental types, 3 clefs, 16 staves per page, smallest note value is a 32nd note, and a maximum of 1 augmentation dot.

Because scanning is not a perfect science, you will need to clean up any file after conversion. Depending on the music, some users will find it easier to simply re-enter the music via one of Finale's traditional note entry methods: Simple Entry, Speedy Entry, or HyperScribe.

We encourage you to respect all copyrights.

Remember that to take advantage of any of Finale's scanning capabilities, you will need to have a properly installed scanner (contact the manufacturer of your scanner if you have questions). Because scanners and scanning software varies widely, we cannot provide instructions on how to prepare a file for every scanner. For some hints on how to prepare a scanned file from some popular scanners, see Scanning in the User Manual. The scanned sheet music image should be saved as a grayscale graphic in an uncompressed TIFF format at a resolution of 300dpi.

• Place a sheet of music on your scanner. Ensure it is placed squarely on the scanner’s bed, and the staff lines are not slanted on the page. Do not use handwritten or photocopied scores. If you have already scanned and saved TIFF files (or want to use our demonstration TIFF file), from the File Menu, choose Scanning: SmartScore Lite, and then Import Existing TIFF File (and skip the next three steps).
• From the File Menu, choose Scanning: SmartScore Lite, and then Scan and Import. Finale opens the SmartScore Lite scanning software. In most cases, all the settings you need to properly scan the file for Finale import are configured.
• Scan the first page of your score. After the scan, click Yes to scan additional pages. Click No once all your pages have been scanned.
• Click OK. The SmartScore Lite dialog box appears.
• Click Add Files to List. The Open dialog box appears. If you just scanned, your files appear in this list. Click the first file in this list and then hold down and click the last file to select all of them. Then click Open (and skip the next step). If you want to import the demonstration TIFF file we have provided, continue with the next step.
• Navigate to the file called: Tutorial 86a.TIFF and double-click on it. The file appears in the file list window.
• Click the file name to highlight it. A preview of the file appears in the left window.
• Click Begin Recognition. Finale will translate the image into a Finale document. The time it takes to complete recognition will depend on the complexity of the file as well as the number of files chosen. In the future, you can translate several files at once by selecting multiple files in the Open dialog box, and then highlighting the ones you want to convert from the file list before pressing Begin Recognition.  

You can also import a .FIN file you have saved in SmartScore Pro. Here’s how:

• From the File Menu, choose Import, and then SmartScore. Double-click on the Tutorial 6a.FIN file. Finale transcribes the SmartScore file and opens the new file. Note that the SmartScore engine also recognized the articulations, such as staccatos and accents. Creating FIN files for import into Finale will require the full version of SmartScore which is created by Musitek. For more information, visit www.musitek.com.

For both the converted TIFF and SmartScore file, you may wish to copy and paste the music into a new Wizard-created document for a fast improvement in layout.

For more information, see Scanning in the User Manual.

Percussion Maps

One of the more powerful aspects of Finale is Percussion Mapping. In General MIDI, each percussion sound is assigned to a MIDI pitch (i.e. MIDI Note 36 is a bass drum sound). Percussion Mapping allows you to map any MIDI note to any staff position.

Suppose you wish to create a score for your drum set player and you are interested in both how the score looks and plays back.

• Click on File and choose New, then Document With Setup Wizard. Enter a title or composer, if desired, then click Next. The second page of the Setup Wizard appears, where you can select your percussion instruments.
• Click Drums in the first column. Double-click Drum Set in the second column. Click Next twice then Finish to select the default settings and create a blank drum score.
• Click the Simple Entry tool  . Click the Quarter Note Tool   on the Simple Entry Palette. Click in the first space of the staff. Note that you hear a bass drum sound as you click. If you don’t, from the Simple Menu, choose Simple Entry Options, check Playback on Mouse Entry and click OK.

Because different drum instruments will often appear on the same staff but with different rhythms, you’ll need to use layers for each instrument appearing at the same time. For example, you’d normally notate the bass drum rhythms on the same staff as the snare drum.

• Next click in the space above the staff. Not only do you hear the closed high-hat sound, the notehead appears as an X as well.

Sometimes, two different sounds appear on the same line or space in the staff. For example, click in the third space of the staff, to enter a snare drum hit. Instead of the snare, you probably heard a side stick sound instead of a snare drum. Simple solution: press numeric keypad -(minus). Click on the note in question. You should now hear a snare drum sound.

As an exercise, let’s enter the following passage:

• First, use the Eraser Tool   to erase our earlier experiment.
• Enter the Hi-Hat and Crash notes above the staff. Enter the snare drum notes in the 3rd space of the staff. To get a snare drum sound, you’ll need a sharped note. Try using the Sharp Tool   in conjunction with the sixteenth note. If you need a refresher on how to enter notes with Simple Entry, see Tutorial 1a: Simple Entry.
• From the View Menu, choose Select Layers, Layer 2. Enter the notes for the bass drum on the first space. You could also choose Layer 2 from the layer selection in the lower left corner of the screen, or hold down and (Mac: and ) and press 2.
• Play it back by hitting Play 1 on the Playback Controls. You should hear a simple drum pattern with the appropriate percussion sounds.

For more information, see the User Manual under Percussion.

When You’re Ready to Continue

If you worked through all of the Finale tutorials, congratulations! You’ve seen all of Finale’s major features at work. Now begin a project of your own. Read the last chapter of this book for some tips, and remember that the User Manual and QuickStart Video Tips are available under the Help Menu.