Tutorial 3: Auditioning your score

Listening to your music to check for mistakes.

Finale’s playback feature gives you the opportunity to hear your music as you write it. This way, you can easily check for mistakes.

By the end of this lesson, you will know how to:

1. Use the Playback Controls
2. Spot check your music
3. Queue playback at any measure

Note. To begin at this point, open "Tutorial 3.MUS." (This tutorial explores playback options without making any changes to the document itself). If you don't care to use NotePad's playback features, skip ahead to Tutorial 4.

The Playback Controls

The Playback Controls give you standard buttons for controlling the playback of your score.

Playback Controls – What it Does:

Use the Play and stop buttons to start and stop playback. As you play back your music, you will probably find that you want to adjust the tempo. The most convenient ways to do this are with the tempo controls or with tempo markings.

Tempo Control – What it Does:

The Tempo drop down can be used to change the note duration for your playback. Enter the metronome marking in the adjacent text box.

Since there’s not yet a tempo marking in this score, you can adjust the tempo in the Playback Controls and play back what you’ve just written.

To specify the playback tempo

1. Click in the Tempo text box.
2. Delete the metronome marking that appears there.
3. Type 100.
4. Click the Play button . By default, Finale starts playing your score from the beginning.
5. Click the Stop button when all the music has been played.

Queuing Playback

You can quickly start playback from any point in the score using a keyboard shortcut.

To queue playback

1. Hold down the SPACEBAR.
2. Click on measure 8 to start playback.
3. Click anywhere outside the staff to stop playback.

To set the playback measure

1. Type a measure number in the Measure text box of the Playback Controls.

2. Click the Play button .
3. Click the Stop button when you’re done listening.

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