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.

1. Click the Staff Tool .   
2. From the View menu, choose Page View.  
3. Scroll to the second page by clicking on the right arrow next to Page at the bottom of the window.
4. 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.
5. From the Staff menu, choose Apply Staff Style To > Score and Parts (or Current Part/Score). 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.
6. 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.

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