Steve Orich spent his formative years playing piano in the theater. From summer stock, to musical director of shows at Stony Brook University, to a national tour of Annie, an international tour of Godspell, to playing in the pits of Broadway shows. As most musicians must, Steve wore a wide variety of hats, but it was always music and always theater.

In college he began writing charts and over the years more and more opportunities arose where he’d be called upon to arrange and copy as well. He was able to hone his arranging skills by studying with Don Sebesky, where, for a wonderful example, each student would write a sax quintet, and Mel Lewis’ sax section would come in and play it live.

After years of playing eight performances a week for several shows on Broadway, Steve began to suspect he’d prefer to move away from performing. In 1985, he took an AFI seminar on film composing, and decided to move to L. A. In time, he became busy composing for sitcoms, documentaries, movies of the week, game shows, animation and more.

One day he got a call to orchestrate a little musical the La Jolla Playhouse was mounting. Even though it was on a small budget (in part because it would only run five weeks), Steve decided to “keep one finger in the theater” and do it.

The little musical told the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ rise to fame, and it eventually became Jersey Boys. Of course this “little” musical ended up running much longer than five weeks, and opened on Broadway a year later, where Steve received a Tony nomination for his orchestrations. The show eventually won four Tonys (including Best Musical), a Grammy (for Best Show Album), and many other awards. With as many as seven simultaneous companies around the world, (New York, London, Chicago, Las Vegas, Toronto, Melbourne, and a U. S. tour), there have been weeks where Jersey Boys has been seen by over 100,000 people! The Grammy-winning album recently went Platinum.

Did I mention that all the music in the show and on the album was orchestrated and copied with Finale?

I spoke to Steve about Jersey Boys and his use of Finale.

Scott Yoho: I just read a great article from the Washington Examiner about your Jersey Boys success, and was intrigued not only by the show’s history, but also how the show’s success has allowed you to re-orchestrate the music numerous times for a wide variety of instrumentations.

Steve Orich: It’s a real rarity. Normally, you write the show, record the album and you’re done. But I’ve had opportunities to write arrangements for the Emmys, the Tonys (three times), Letterman, Leno, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, even the National Symphony; all those were additional opportunities to do some of the same songs in a different way with a different ensemble.

SY: And an opportunity for us to link to the YouTube video of that National Symphony piece. Let’s talk about your use of music software. Where did you start?

SO: When I studied with Don Sebesky, I wrote by hand. You have a piece of paper and a pencil, and you have a physical relationship with them.

After that, I tried several music notation programs, including Encore and Overture. I also worked with Cakewalk from DOS 1.0 on. It wasn’t a notation program per se, but I used to print out Cakewalk’s rudimentary score, mark the articulations, phrasing and dynamics by hand, then I would send that off to a copyist along with a MIDI file.

I came upon Finale around ten or twelve years ago, and it felt like the answer to all my problems. Besides offering the ability to enter notes and make it look like a professional, complete score, I could extract the parts. In the theatre, there are a lot of orchestration jobs where you do your own copying, so to be able to orchestrate and copy by myself on my own computer was a remarkable thing. Also, using audio playback is a great proofreading tool, particularly when I’m doing larger scores.

Then things changed dramatically with the evolution of Human Playback and the Garritan sounds. Now, I can add a crescendo, accent, or articulation and hear it played back.

Creating a MIDI demo and an instrumental chart are two very different things: It has to be optimized for one or the other. With Finale, I can create a score the way I want the musicians to see it, and I can play it back. Even if it’s not a recordable representation, it’s a decent version where I can say, oh yes, that’s a good balance, or an accent here might be better, or a staccato there – I get immediate audio feedback.

When I did Jersey Boys at the La Jolla Playhouse, the very first production, I was not just the orchestrator, but also the copyist and synth programmer. To be able to orchestrate and create the copied parts simultaneously was invaluable.

Finale is really a wonderful program. I live inside there every single day.

SY: I’m curious how Linked Parts affected your workflow.

SO: Oh, my gosh. That was the second major thing in Finale that changed everything I did. Before that, I’d create the parts, then with the inevitable changes, I’d be constantly re-extracting. Today, when there’s a change in the part, that change is automatically made in the score.

You know with a lot of orchestration jobs, it’s a one-shot deal. For instance when you’re recording, the players make changes on the stand, you finish, and then you’re done. The parts get thrown in the trash.

In a theatrical performance of a show where the same music is being performed eight times a week, in multiple companies around the world as Jersey Boys has done, it needs to be refined and done exactly the same way every time. Sometimes a conductor might make a change in someone’s part, whether it’s an articulation or a voicing, changing an octave because of something that’s going on onstage, or an actual cut in the piece. We do occasionally have to change things. When that happens, I don’t need to work from a score. I make a change in the Linked Part in Finale, and the score reflects it.

SY: In the past would you have taken the time to update the score as well, or would you have just changed the parts and found the score was out-of-sync?

SO: I wouldn’t have done either, I would have paid something else to do it! It’s much too time consuming. Linked Parts have been fantastic – especially in a process that’s always in flux, that’s always changing and being modified.

SY: Earlier I mentioned an article about you in the Washington Examiner. I thought it told a great story, where you’d gotten to where you weren’t doing much theater work anymore, and then wham! It sort of suggests that great things do happen when you least suspect them.

SO: Yes, it often happens that way. Also, sometimes your first love comes back to you. When I was growing up, my only association with music was theater. The other stuff came later. It was almost like the theater always came easily to me so I wanted to work a little harder elsewhere. Then I realized that if you’re good at it, do it. It really made a huge difference in every aspect of my life to coming back to this.

You know what else is cool? When a chart is good, it works. I have been to Jersey Boys openings around the world. When I hear a brand new band of completely different musicians playing the score, and it sounds exactly as I intended, that’s a real rush. It’s clear that they know how to interpret what I wrote and they’re all hearing it the same way and creating it that way; they got it! 

SY: You know you’ve been successful at communicating.

SO: Exactly – and how often can we say that in life?

SY: Amen.

SO: And that’s what Finale is about. First of all communicating what exists in your head to the computer or the page, and then communicating that to the musicians and the audience.

I’d like to thank Steve for taking the time to share his perspective with us. Learn more about Steve’s work at http://steveorich.com/ and let us know what you’re up to by clicking on “Comments” below.

At a recent Finale training session, I met a music minister who asked how he might quickly turn hymns into brass quintets. He was so jazzed with my answer I decided to share it with you as well.

The answer is: “Explode Music.”

While I’ve mentioned Explode Music briefly in the past, this week I’d like to cover its use in more detail.

Finale’s Explode Music feature allows you to instantly orchestrate existing music by taking music from one or two staves and automatically distributing it over multiple staves. We’ll start with my friend’s hymn as our example. The following could have been entered via scanning, or any other note entry method in Finale:

Here is how I would use Explode Music to turn this hymn into an arrangement for brass quintet:

1. Launch Finale’s Setup Wizard, and on the first page select the “Garritan Brass Quintet” or the “Brass Quintet” Ensemble (the former sounds best, the latter works better on slower machines or when you’ll share the completed file with others who may not have Finale). From here, follow the prompts in the Setup Wizard, or simply press Next, Next, Next, and Finish.
2. Paste the music above into the top two staves of your new brass quintet chart. The first half should now look something like this: 

3. With the Selection tool chosen, select the top two staves. To do this, click to the left of the top staff’s instrument name (Trumpet in Bb 1), then shift-click to the left of the second staff’s instrument name. Then, from the Utilities menu choose Explode Music, or use the Selection tool shortcut of typing 2.
4. Configure the resulting Explode Music dialog box as I have below. Specifically, split the music into 4 staves and place the music into existing staves starting with Trumpet 1:

5. Click OK and the music is instantly exploded.

In looking at the result, you may notice that the tuba staff remains unpopulated. One quick solution is to copy the trombone part to the tuba part, then lower it an octave. To do so, select the tuba part and type 8 to utilize the transposition shortcut mentioned in last week’s post. Having done that, the first system should look something like this:

That strikes me as pretty quick and easy.

As a final tip, you might consider using the Check Range plug-in if you’re unsure of the ranges of any of the instruments in your arrangements. If you’d like more detail on how to do that, or on anything else Finale-related, please let us know by clicking on “Comments” below!

Ever wish you had a numeric keypad on your laptop to facilitate faster note entry into Finale? If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone Edovia has an app for you!

The Numpad app contains layouts for many keyboard configurations, including one for Finale Simple Entry. 

For more information, visit edovia here.

Do you often experience “flashes of brilliance?”

Me neither.

But something similar occurred the other day as I watched Chris Porter, an amazing band director and Finale user, demonstrating at a Finale training session. While Chris knows all about Finale’s Exercise Wizard, she was showing how she creates additional customized exercises for her band’s warm-ups.

I admired her efficiency as she worked. Rather than create a full score, she simply entered five staves, one for each of the various transpositions:

1. Non-transposed instruments in treble clef (flutes, oboes),
2. Eb instruments (alto and bari saxes),
3. Bb instruments (clarinets, tenor saxes, and trumpets),
4. F instruments (horns),
5. Non-transposed instruments bass clef (bassoons and trombones)

Very smart.

Next she entered her warm-up on one staff…

…and then copied the contents of this staff to all the subsequent staves, one staff at a time.

Everyone was duly impressed.

But as I watched I thought of one additional trick she could use to become even more efficient. We call it vertical copying.

Here’s how it works:

1. With the Selection Tool indicate the music you’d like to copy into other staves.
2. Now, Ctrl+Alt+click (Windows) or Ctrl+Opt+click (Mac) on the first staff/measure in which you’d like this music copied.

3. In the Paste Multiple box that appears, simply indicate you wish to “Paste Vertically: To the bottom of the score,” and hit OK (or your Enter key). Every staff is populated:

That’s a great time saver.

Need to transpose the bottom two staves? Select them and hit “8,” and they’re transposed down an octave. (I discussed transposition and other helpful shortcuts in an earlier post.)

What makes the vertical copying tip really great is that the procedure and keystrokes are the same as for horizontal copying, where you copy a section of music multiple times on the same staff. Again, just select the music you wish to copy, then Ctrl+Alt+click (Windows) or Ctrl+Opt+click (Mac) on the first measure in which you’d like the paste to occur, and indicate what you want copied where and how many times.

Simply remembering this keystroke shortcut can be a huge time saver on certain projects: I hope you get as much use out of it as I do.

Let us know how it’s working for you by clicking on “Comments” below.

Looking to create Gregorian Chant or other meterless music in Finale 2011? Need help setting up a MIDI keyboard in Finale? Wondering if your version of Finale will work in the latest version of Windows?

Check out the Finale Knowledge Base!

The Knowledge Base offers answers to frequently asked questions, from “How to” tutorials to troubleshooting tips. 

If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the Knowledge Base, simply click the “Submit a Support Case” link and one of our technical support agents will help you get what you need!

Let us know how the Knowledge Base is working for you by clicking on "Comments" below.

Some Finale users have more complex notation needs than others. That makes sense: I would imagine that someone creating avant garde 21st century notation would push notational boundaries more than someone creating a traditional string quartet or big band score.

The surprise, to me at least, was that General Music educators also have complex notation needs, despite teaching the simplest music possible. How can this be?

Consider for a second; who else requires one huge measure per page with one whole note placed in the middle of the measure?

That a music engraver would never put a whole note in the middle of the measure doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is what a General Music educator might require to best convey the concept they’re teaching. What’s more, they might also require even more outlandish things like having each pitch appear in a different color, which is often the case when writing for Boomwhackers.

Boomwhackers are affordable and fun musical instruments that are very popular in General Music classes. According to their website, they are brightly colored plastic tubes that are tuned by length to musical notes. The site also goes on to describe the Chroma-Notes™ colored music system, where each pitch has a corresponding color. This color is used both for each note on the staff and the associated Boomwhackers.

This is what typical Boomwhackers notation might look like:

I met the man who invented Boomwhackers, Craig Ramsell, when he introduced himself at our booth during the 2007 Percussive Arts Society convention. At the time, Finale 2008 had just been released and it included support for Boomwhackers and the Chroma-Note System, so was I excited to learn more and quickly invited Craig to lunch.

Just like his Boomwhackers, Craig is colorful and musical, and as such he was a delightful lunch guest. He told me about the development process of integrating Boomwhackers support within Finale and how he personally recorded the Boomwhackers samples that Finale plays back.

You might think that getting Finale to play back these samples – or display different colors for each pitch – might take some tricky configuration.  Not so. Simply choose Boomwhackers in Finale’s Setup Wizard as I’ve done below:

When you subsequently enter notes in the resulting staves, you’ll automatically see the appropriately colored notes on the staff, and when you hit play you’ll hear actual Boomwhackers samples Craig recorded play back.

Are you using Boomwhackers in your General Music program or otherwise have complex music notation needs? Let us know how it’s going by clicking on “Comments” below!

Composer and pianist Dan Cavanagh is the Associate Director of Jazz Studies and an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also works as a freelance jazz pianist, composer, clinician, and adjudicator. While full details of his busy musical life are available at his website, here are a few of the highlights:

• Dan’s compositions have been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and many other national and international venues.
• Dan has received commissions from a wide range of groups across North America.
• Dan’s compositions have received numerous awards, including Winner of the International Music Prizes for Excellence in Composition 2009 (sponsored by the National Academy of Music).
• In addition to many groups who have recorded his music, the Jazz Emporium Big Band, led by Dan, have released an album of his original charts entitled Pulse.
• Dan has been commissioned by Documentary Arts, Inc., to compose music for its upcoming documentary film, The Beat Hotel.

Despite all this, one of Dan’s most cherished achievements is that he was once selected as a member of the Finale Technical Support team.

Okay, I’m only assuming it was one of his most cherished achievements. Nevertheless he was great in that role as well, and we continue to delight in his subsequent achievements.

I asked Dan to share a little of his history with Finale, and he was kind enough to do so:

"I’ve been using Finale since high school, version 3.5. After graduating from college, I did a stint in MakeMusic’s technical support, which to this day continues to inform my Finale “chops.” I rarely need the user manual because of that job, and I probably spoke to some of the readers of your blog on the phone!
 
Today I use Finale for all of my composition projects; from big band charts, to classical music, to film scoring, to jazz-chamber-text pieces. I continue to welcome the new enhancements Finale comes up with each year, and find them invaluable to my process as a composer. Honestly, the most un-fun part of the compositional process is the notation and preparation of score and parts, so Finale is my best friend when it comes to minimizing that stage of the game."

Dan was also willing to share a favorite Finale tip:

"I have recently moved to a two-monitor set-up, and I can’t recommend that enough for all Finale users, especially since the advent of multiple-page editing. For large scores, such as a film score or a big band chart, the ability to see ALL of the instruments at once for more than 8 measures can be a huge time saver. In our jazz courses at UT Arlington, we are saving quite a bit of paper by requiring students to e-mail or post their composition and theory assignments in Finale, rather than on paper. That, combined with the ability to create assignments for SmartMusic, has left more class time for actual instruction, and less time outside of class for grading."

I’d like to close by saying that Dan also has a great sense of humor and an infectious smile. If you get a chance to see him perform, do so, and you’ll know I’m telling the truth about that (if not about his most cherished musical achievements).

Finale includes dozens of plug-ins. I describe Finale’s plug-ins as “little applications that make complicated tasks easy.” One of the coolest plug-ins (and perhaps my favorite to demonstrate) is called “Band-in-a-Box Auto-Harmonizing.” This plug-in automatically harmonizes any melody, allowing you to choose from a wide variety of harmonization styles, ranging from two to six parts.

All you need to provide is a melody, although the results are “greatly enhanced” when you also provide chord symbols.

To demonstrate, I’ve used Finale’s Setup Wizard to quickly create a score, and have added a melody, an idea for a background part, and some chord symbols: 

1. First I’ll need to indicate what staff I’d like to harmonize: so I choose the Selection tool and click to the left of the Alto Sax 1 part to select this entire staff.
2. Then, from the Plug-ins menu, I’ll select Scoring and Arranging > Band-in-a-Box Auto-Harmonizing:

3.  In the Band-in-a-Box Auto-Harmonizing dialog box, I’ll select “Five Part” (because I have five saxes), “Drop Two (Super Sax),” as my desired style, and I’ll indicate that I want to place the new voices into  “four existing staves” starting with Alto Sax 2. Upon clicking “OK” the plug-in generates parts for all the remaining saxes.

Next I did essentially the same thing for the brass by selecting the Trumpet 1 staff and choosing “Six Part>Big Band Brass," from the Trumpet 2 part down.

Here are the results:

I think that’s pretty amazing – and very quick.

Here are a few caveats:

• I think this feature is best used as an “idea generator,” allowing Finale users to experiment with different harmonizations before deciding which direction to head. Then, using their ears to evaluate the results, they might quickly decide that a more triadic approach might work better than sixth and ninth chords for this partiular gospel piece (or whatever).
• Having made the above point, I have used this feature for parts of final arrangements more than I care to admit.
• If you teach jazz arranging you may choose to not share this feature with your students.

I hope this is helpful. I’ve found this feature to a total gas to play around with and it has provided me with more time for the rest of my life!

Let us know how this plug-in, or anything else in Finale, is working for you by clicking on “Comments” below.

The Garritan Aria Player in Finale 2011

In part because I think its interface makes for a nice blog photo, I thought I’d talk about the cool Garritan Aria Player included with Finale 2011.

This updated player is the same one found in Garritan Personal Orchestra 4.0, and has a new user interface with clearer controls. Plus it looks nice. The most signifigant improvement is likely the “Save Ensembles” feature. This lets you quickly load multiple sounds, even when you’re configuring the player manually. 

“Great,” you’re thinking, “what does that mean?”

If you’re mostly using Finale to create new music, probably nothing – to you. If you set up your scores with the Setup Wizard, all your sounds are automatically configured for you, so you may never use this feature.

However, if you have a lot of older scores, which you occasionally dust off and put to use, this might be a big deal. When you open an older file that wasn’t configured to use Garritan sounds, you have to manually configure which staves play which sounds. It’s actually pretty easy in the Aria interface, but if you have larger scores it can get to be a bit of clicking, and this new feature allows you to bypass the tedium.

If, for example, you have a library of marching band scores, all with the same instrumentation, once you’ve configured one of these in the Aria Player, you can save that configuration as an “Ensemble.” The next time you open a similar file, you can simply load that same Ensemble and you’re done; every staff is configured.

Of more general interest, Finale 2011 also includes an expanded collection of Garritan sounds. Recent additions include bass trombone, brass section, children's choir ahs, flute section, electronic drumkit, synth space voice, synth warm pad, and steel drums. The complete collection appears here.

Please let us know how the Garritan sounds are working for you by clicking on “Comments” below.

At a recent Finale training in Dallas I spoke to a user who had figured out HOW to do what they wanted to do with Finale, but not how to do it efficiently.

To see what they were up against, select the Staff tool, double-click on any staff, and check out the Staff Attributes of that staff. Here you have awesome control over what appears and doesn’t appear on each staff. You can choose to display or hide everything from chords and clefs to repeats and rests. You can change staff name fonts, clefs, hide staves, all kinds of things.

Once you double-clicked on the staff all of this is pretty clear.

What wasn’t clear, at least to this user, was how to make a Staff Attribute change that will impact ALL staves: There’s no provision to do that here, and thus you may assume that you’ll have to repeat this process for every staff in your score. The good news is that you don’t!

The solution is a wonderfully useful plug-in that doesn’t get enough attention:

[Cue the echo chamber effect.] Global Staff Attributes.  

Let’s see how easy it is to, for example, change the staff name fonts for an entire piece. To check it out go to Plug-ins > Scoring and Arranging > Global Staff Attributes:

While the “Global” name might imply otherwise, you have fine control over which staves you affect, and as a bonus you don’t need to specify this prior to selecting the plug-in. What’s more, you can even select noncontiguous staves as I’ve done below:

However, for our example, you’ll probably want to select all staves, click the corresponding Select Fonts button, and chose your desired font. You can also choose the same font, or something different, for your group names as well.

When you’re done simply hit “OK,” or click “Apply” if you subsequently want to change something else with the plug-in.

I have found the Global Staff Attributes plug-in helpful in so many ways and my hope is that, now that you know about it, you will too. Please let us know what you think by clicking on “Comments” below.