Tutorial 5: Working with Scores and Parts

It’s time to learn about Finale’s more powerful score-oriented features. If you plan to work mainly on lead sheets, you may just want to skim this section. But if you intend to create multi-staff scores—particularly orchestral scores—you will want to go through this whole tutorial. By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to create from scratch a conductor’s score and parts.

If you have a document currently open, close it.

• Open the document called “Tutorial 5.” This document currently consists of a single staff, filled with music.
• From the View Menu, select Scroll View. You may find that it is easier to do all of your editing work in Scroll View (where the music is laid out in a continuous horizontal band), especially when working with scores that contain several staves.
• Click the Staff Tool  .
• From the Staff Menu, choose New Staves. The New Staves dialog box appears, asking how many staves you’d like to add, and how much distance you want between them. The negative number in this box is the distance from the top of one staff to the top of the next. Here, a positive number measures upward; a negative number measures downward.
• Type 3 and click OK. Finale has added three evenly spaced staves, giving you a total of four; let’s imagine that you’re going to create a string quartet.

You can reposition a staff by grabbing its handle and dragging it up or down. To remove a staff, click it and then press Delete.

To see more staves, select a smaller view percentage from the View Menu, Zoom submenu.

Setting Clefs and Staff Names

If you use the Setup Wizard, you’ll have all of the clefs and staff names set up for you. If you decide you don’t like what the Wizard chose, you can always edit them using the techniques below. We’ll edit the new staves to match the appropriate clefs and names for a string quartet.

• Click the top staff. When you click anywhere on the staff to the right of the time signature, you select the staff. You can also use the Staff Tool to select measures, such as for applying a Staff Style. We’ll cover Staff Styles later in this tutorial.
• From the Staff Menu, select Edit Staff Attributes. The Staff Attributes dialog box appears. (You can also double-click the staff.)

The full name of the instrument will appear next to the staff in the first system (line) of the piece. The abbreviated name will appear next to subsequent systems.

• Click the Edit button across from Full Name. The Edit Text window appears

• Type “Violin I”; click OK.
• Click the Edit button across from Abbr. Name.
• Type “Vln. I”; click OK.

Incidentally, you establish the default font for staff names using the Select Default Fonts command in the Options menu (this will affect all staff names for newly created staves; it will not change existing staff names).global position of staff names using the commands in the Set Default Name Positions submenu of the Staff Menu, and you establish the default font for staff names using the Fonts section of the Document Options dialog box (under the Document Menu). This will affect all staff names which have not yet been created; it will not change existing staff names. Once you’ve created a staff name, you can edit its font by using the Font command in the Text Menu, which appears in the Edit Text window. The global positioning setting can be overridden by clicking the Position buttons in the Staff Attributes dialog box. For example, by clicking the Position checkbox and button right now, you can nudge the abbreviated name, Vln. I, closer to the staff.

Don’t use to exit the Edit Text dialog box. Finale will think you want to add a new line.

You could click OK at this point; you’d return to the score, where the first staff’s name would now appear. However, as long as you’re at it, you may as well set up the other staves:

• From the staff drop-down list at the top of the Staff Attributes dialog box, choose [Staff 2]. The contents of the dialog box change to reflect the staff attributes of the second staff in the score.
• Name this staff Violin II, and enter Vln. II as its abbreviated name. Once again, you can move directly to the attributes box for the next staff without having to go back to the score.
• From the staff drop-down list, choose [Staff 3]. You’re now looking at the attributes for the third, or viola, staff.
• Type Viola as the full staff name, and Vla. as the abbreviation.  
• Near the clef display, click Select. The Clef Selection dialog box appears. Finale allows you to use up to sixteen different clefs in a particular document. You can even design your own clefs in the Clef Designer. For now, we want the alto clef.
• Double-click the alto clef (the second clef in the top row).  

• From the staff drop-down list, choose [Staff 4]. Enter the full name, Cello, and the abbreviation, Vc.  
• Click OK. To the left of the clef display, click Select and double-click on the bass clef (the fourth clef in the top row).
• Click OK. If you want to adjust the overall positioning of the new instrument names, choose Full Staff Names or Abbreviated Staff Names from the Set Default Name Positions submenu of the Staff Menu. You’ll see a dialog box that lets you drag the staff name wherever you want relative to the staff itself.

Selecting Partial Measures; Transposing a Region

Up to this point, you’ve done all your manipulation of music in one-measure increments. Using the Selection Tool, you’ve clicked a measure to select it, drag-enclosed several whole measures, clicked the first measure and -clicked the last measure, or clicked in the left margin to select an entire staff.

But selecting a measure at a time is like selecting a word at a time in a word processor—it’s a nice shortcut, but sometimes you need to select in smaller units.

What if you want to select half a measure—or only one note?

• Click the Selection Tool . You don’t need to change any settings to select partial measures, just learn a couple techniques.

In the musical example you have on the screen, for example, suppose you decide that a certain passage in the Violin I part would sound better if it were up a third.

• Scroll to measure 6. Click and hold in measure 6, just above and before the third beat. Drag down and to the right, until you’ve selected the first two eighth notes in measure 7. When you release the mouse button, the region is highlighted.

• Hold down and press once. Notice the selection expands one note to the right.
• Hold down and press once. The selection contracts to its original size. When you first select a region, hold down and press if you want to adjust the beginning of the region instead of the end. Hold down and Windows users , Mac users , to expand and contract by full measures.
• From the Utilities Menu, choose Transpose. The Transposition dialog box appears.
• Choose the radio buttons for Up and Diatonically. From the Interval drop-down list, choose Third. Click OK. You return to the score, and the selected region is now up a third.

If a region including partial measures is too big to drag-select (e.g. on different pages), drag-select a smaller region that begins where desired, navigate so the desired end-point is in view, then hold down d and click to specify the end of the selection. If you do want to select a whole measure, double-click the measure. (If you double-click a second time, and your score has more than one staff, you extend the selection vertically, to include the selected measures in every staff - also called the “measure stack.”)

The technique you just learned—selecting a region, then applying a command from the Utilities Menu—is extremely powerful. Select some music, and then take a glance at the commands in this Menu to the other available options. In addition to Transpose, they include Rebeam (which affects how notes are beamed together after you’ve already entered the music); Fit Measures (which, in Page View, forces a group of selected measures into one system); and many other convenient features. With a combination of the Selection Tool and the Utilities Menu (and Edit Menu), you should be able to transform any music in your score in any way you can imagine.

Use the following key commands to quickly transpose a selected region: /-6 = Down M2, /-7 = Up M2, /-8 = Down octave, /-9 = Up Octave.

Hiding Staves (Staff Sets)

If you plan to work on larger orchestral scores, you may become impatient with the time it takes the computer to redraw the screen after each change you make. Fortunately, Finale can greatly speed your work up by hiding the staves in Scroll View that you’re not currently editing. If you want to permanently hide staves, see Optimizing Systems later in this tutorial.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to work just on the Violin I and Viola lines; you want to hide the blank staves so Finale won’t waste time redrawing them.

• From the View Menu, choose Scroll View.  
• Click the Staff Tool  . First you’ll use the Staff Tool to tell Finale which staves you want to see.
• Click the handle of the Violin I staff. Then, while pressing , click the handle of the Viola staff. -clicking allows you to select several staves one at a time, even if they’re not adjacent in the score.

Now that you’ve specified the staves, it’s time to program one of the Staff Sets.

• While pressing and holding (Mac: ), select the View Menu, then choose Program Staff Set; choose Staff Set 1 from the submenu that pops out. (Don’t release /  until you choose the Staff Set.) You’ve just programmed Staff Set 1 to display only the first and third staves. (In Finale, pressing (Mac: ) often means “I’m programming something.” In the View Menu, Finale actually displays different commands depending on whether or not you were holding down the / key when you opened the menu.)

As soon as you program Staff Set 1, the two blank staves vanish. They’re still part of the piece; they’re just hidden for the moment. Furthermore, you can rearrange staves in each Staff Set—dragging them up or down as much as you want—without disturbing the staff order in the “full-score” view.

Inserting Staves

Let’s say we add a flute to our string quartet. We could use the same technique for adding staves as before, but this time we’ll save some work and let the Wizard create them.

From the View Menu, choose Select Staff Set, then All Staves. If at any time you wish to return to the full-score view of your piece, select All Staves.

• Click the Staff Tool . The Staff Menu appears. We want to insert our flute staff above the Violin I staff.
• Click on the handle of the Violin I staff. The staff handle is a small box on the top staff line near the clef.
• From the Staff Menu, choose New Staves (with Setup Wizard). The Parts page of the Setup Wizard appears.
• From the Instrument drop-down list, choose SmartMusic SoftSynth. Then choose Woodwinds.
• Double-click on the Flute in the middle column. The Flute instrument appears in the selection window.
• Click on the Finish button. The Wizard adds a Flute staff above our selected staff, in this case the Violin I staff.

Transposing Instruments

But what if we made a mistake? What if we really wanted to add a clarinet? You could delete the flute staff and add a clarinet from the Wizard, but let’s say you’ve already added music and you don’t want to lose it. We’ve already seen how to change the staff name earlier in this Tutorial, so we’ll just cover how to change the staff from a C instrument to a transposing instrument.

• Click the Staff Tool .
• Double-click on the Flute staff to the right of the clef and signatures. The Staff Attributes dialog box for the Flute staff appears. Using the techniques you learned earlier, change the Staff Names to Clarinet and Cl., but don’t exit the Staff Attributes dialog box.
• Click the Transposition box and click Select. The Staff Transpositions dialog box appears. You could design your own transposition, but you don’t need to for common instruments, such as a clarinet, French horn or saxophone.

• Next to Key Signature, click on None to open a menu of choices. Select (B) Up M2, Add 2 sharps.
• Click OK twice. Your staff should now look like a clarinet staff, complete with transposition. All of the other non-transposing staves have two flats in the key signature, while the top staff has no flats in a Bf transposition.

Staff Styles

Let’s say you wanted your woodwind player to switch between flute and clarinet in the middle of the piece—not uncommon for a jazz band piece. The Staff Attributes sets the default transposition for the staff through the entire piece, but Staff Styles add the ability to shape your staff on a measure-by-measure basis. Staff Styles can do a lot more than just transpositions; for more information, see Staff Styles in the User Manual.

For this experiment, we’ll switch to flute for measures 5 through 8.

• Click the Staff Tool .   
• From the View Menu, choose Page View.  
• Scroll to the second page by clicking on the right arrow next to Page at the bottom of the window.
• Click on the first measure of the top system, Clarinet staff, then -click on the last measure of the Clarinet staff on the top system. Make sure you don’t click to the left of the staff or you may accidentally select every measure in the staff. The Staff Style we’ll apply will affect only the measures we’ve selected without changing the clarinet transposition for the rest of the piece.
• From the Staff Menu, choose Apply Staff Style. The Apply Staff Style dialog box appears with a selection of pre-defined Staff Styles. Keep in mind you can create your own Staff Styles to suit your own needs. You can even create a library of Staff Styles you can load into any document.
• Double-click on Flute Transposition. (You may need to scroll down.) Your clarinet staff now has a flute staff name and a C instrument transposition. Note that Finale adds a blue bar above the measures. These non-printing bars show you where Staff Styles have been applied and can be turned off in the Staff Menu (uncheck Show Staff Styles). If you scroll back to page 1, you’ll see that your earlier measures are still in a clarinet transposition and don’t have marker bars.

Optimizing Systems

This section is critical for people who plan to work with orchestral scores.

When a publisher assembles an orchestral score, it’s customary to remove any staff, within a given system, that consists entirely of rests. If, for example, you have a score for a 24-piece orchestra that begins with a 16-measure flute solo, you probably don’t want that flute solo to consume four full score pages—with 23 blank instrumental staves on each page. Instead, you’d want the flute line to appear by itself for the first few lines of music.

Finale can perform this suppression of blank staves for you, either one staff system at a time or for the whole piece at once, in a process called optimizing systems.

It’s very important that you understand how this process works. When you optimize the first system of music, Finale memorizes the status of all staves in the score; it stores the fact that only the flute part has notes in it and that all the others are empty.

Finale will steadfastly hold onto its conception of the staff arrangement, however, even if you later add music to currently blank staves. For example, if you decide that the clarinet should double the flute solo—and you write the music into its part—Finale will still print only the flute part, because that’s the only staff that had music at the time you optimized systems. In this instance, you would have to unoptimize and then reoptimize all those staff systems.

Therefore, it’s best to optimize systems only after your music is exactly as you want it.

This example assumes you’re in Page View, with the “Tutorial 5” document open.

• Click the Page Layout Tool  . The Page Layout Menu appears.
• From the Page Layout Menu, choose Optimize Staff Systems. The Staff System Optimization dialog box appears. You have two primary options. You can either optimize the specified systems or unoptimize them. If you optimize, you have a few choices on how Finale handles the optimization. You’ll want to Remove Empty Staves and Keep At Least One Staff, but turn off Ask Before Removing Staves. This option allows you more fine-tuned control over optimizing, but Finale works faster without it. If you unoptimize, you’ll restore the suppressed staves to the printed image. If you leave the All systems of current part/score radio button selected in the Change area, the command affects the entire piece. In a full orchestra score, you’d want to optimize system 2 through the end. The first system will display the full forces of the piece, but suppress empty staves through the rest of the score.

• Click OK, and move back to page one. Take a look at the score—instead of five staves, only one is visible. Because the other four were blank, they were removed from the display. Finale lets you know the systems have been optimized by displaying a non-printing optimization icon (shown in the next image). If you wanted to restore the staves, you’d repeat this example; but in the Staff System Optimization dialog box, you’d select Remove Staff System Optimization.

If there’s a certain staff—even an empty one—that you want to retain even though the display of the other blank staves is suppressed (for instance, the empty left hand of a piano part), there’s a quick way to ensure that it doesn’t get hidden. Finale decides whether or not a staff is empty by looking for entries—notes or rests; in other words, if it finds nothing in a given system but the default whole rests, the staff gets hidden. All you need to do, therefore, to force the display of a staff is to enter a “real” whole rest in any one of the measures. (Click a measure with the Speedy Entry Tool and press the 7 key.) Finale considers this “real” whole rest an entry, because you put it there—as opposed to the default whole rests Finale puts in every empty measure—so that it won’t suppress the staff when optimizing.

You could also double-click the staff with the Staff Tool and deselect “Allow Optimization.” For more details, see the User Manual under the Staff Attributes dialog box.

There may even be times when you’ll want to optimize your staves, even if all the staves are full of music since optimized staves can be moved independently within systems with the Staff Tool. When you do this, staves in other systems are unchanged. Furthermore, with optimization on, you can create new staff groups and rebracket them accordingly (see Brackets: Staves in the User Manual). Keep this fact in mind when you have a piece in which the distance between staves (or the bracketing configuration) must vary from system to system.

Linked Parts

After you have optimized, the score should be all but complete. It’s now time to deal with the parts. In the Finale of old, when the score was finished and you were ready to generate parts, you needed to extract them into autonomous documents, which themselves needed to be cleaned up and individually prepared for printing. Any change to the score required an edit to all respective parts. Today, parts are integrated within the score and the content is intelligently linked. Edits to music in the score also apply to the part. Changes to notation in either score or part applies to the other respectively, but many elements in parts, such as expressions and text, can be edited independently. In this section, you will learn how to create, manage, edit, and print parts using Linked Parts technology.

Whenever you begin a document with the Setup Wizard (or add a staff with the New Staves (with Setup Wizard) command), you have the option to “Generate Linked Parts.” When you check this box, upon completing the Wizard, Finale generates the parts based on the instruments you chose. To view parts, from the Document Menu, choose Edit Parts, and then select the part - the part name is always originally the same as the staff/group name from the score.

Optimization can be added or removed at any time—before or after parts have been generated.

There’s no hurry to create linked parts however, they can be added at any time. You might even wait until the score is complete before generating them (if, for example, you are working with scores created in a version prior to Finale 2009.) Our document does not yet contain parts, so let’s generate them now. To start from this point, open “Tutorial 5a.”

• The Page Layout Tool   should still be selected (if it isn’t, choose it now). From the Page Layout Menu, choose Optimize Staff Systems. Check Remove staff system optimization, and click OK. Now all staves in the score are visible. (For our purposes, this will make it easier to distinguish between the score and parts).
• From the Document Menu, choose Manage Parts. The Manage Parts dialog box appears.
• Click Generate Parts. Finale populates the list with one part for each instrument. Finale names the part based on the instrument name. If a grand staff were in the score, Finale would have added a single part and used the group name for the part.

Click Edit Part Definition to change the part name, add or remove staves, and make other advanced edits to your parts.

• Click OK. Finale generates the parts. You can choose a part under the Edit Menu. Or, easily navigate between them by holding down (Windows users) and , (Mac users) and , and pressing . (period) or , (comma). Or, choose a part from the View Menu.

As mentioned earlier, notation changes (such as changing pitches and rhythms) made to either the part or the score apply to the other respectively. Change the pitch of a note in the part and check the score to see for yourself. Since other markings, such as expressions, often need to be positioned differently in the parts than in the score, the positioning link between an expression in a part and its parent can be broken.

• Click the Expression Tool  .
• In the score, double-click on top staff, measure 1.
• Double-click themarking. You can now reposition this expression—as you do, you are setting the position for both score and parts. Next, we’ll specify the positioning for this expression in a part, but not the score.
• From the Document Menu, choose Edit Part, then Violin 1. You are now viewing the Violin I part.
• Click and drag the marking to the right. By repositioning the expression in the part, you are breaking this expression’s positioning link. The expression changes color, to orange, indicating the link has been broken. When you reposition an expression in a part, your change only applies only to that part, and future positioning changes to that expression in the score do not apply to that part (unless the expression in the score is dragged into a different measure. If this is the case, relink the expression).
• From the Document menu, choose Edit Score. The position of the expression in the score remains unchanged.
• Click and drag the expression to the right in the score.  
• From the Document Menu, choose Edit Part, then Violin I. Notice the expression remains where you positioned it previously. Now, let’s say you decide this expression should be linked to the one in the score as it was originally.
• Windows users right-click, Mac users, -click and choose Relink To Score. The expression returns to the position specified in the score. Positioning changes to this expression in the score also apply to this expression as they did originally.

Note you can relink an expression in all parts by selecting Relink In All Parts from the Expression context menu in the score.

Expressions are only one of many types of elements that can be edited this way. Text, repeat markings, articulations, chords, and other markings behave similarly. See Linked Parts in the User Manual for details.

When the score and parts are nearing completion, it’s time to transform consecutive empty measures into multimeasure rests.

• From the Edit Menu, choose Multimeasure rests, and then Create for Parts/Score. The Select Parts/Score dialog box appears.  

• Check each part you want to change. Generally, score files do not contain multimeasure rests, so for now, we’ll choose every part except the score.
• Click OK. Finale applies multimeasure rests to consecutive empty measures based on your settings in Document Options-Multimeasure Rests (under the Document Menu).

After creating multimeasure rests, you may want to visit each part to ensure the measure and system layout meets your approval. For example, if a measure occupies a whole system at the end of the part, you can use the Selection Tool to fix it (select the measure and press the up arrow key on your keyboard).

When parts are complete, print them directly from the project file. Simply choose Print from the File Menu and check the parts you want to print. See Printing linked parts in the User Manual for details.  

When You’re Ready to Continue

Close your string quartet document, saving it if you want.

In the next tutorial, we’ll cover some techniques to make your score sound as good as it looksfor Guitar notation and tablature. If you won’t be notating for guitarplaying back your scores, feel free to skip Tutorial 6ahead to Tutorial 7.