In past blogs I have discussed Finale's beginnings - including Finale's first name, the first time I ever saw the HyperScribefeature demonstrated, and more. But I have not written much about the original Finale program itself. As with any creation, its origins are only of interest to those with an affinity for the finished work. But I am going to assume we're all here because of our interest in Finale, and that you'll forgive me if I share a miniscule bit of trivia suitable only for folks as geeky as myself.

In 2008, in celebration of Finale's twentieth anniversary, we incorporated the original Finale logo design of a conductor into our marketing materials, as shown above. In the first versions of Finale you would see this conductor when you selected "About Finale" from the Help menu.  Few people know, however, that if you waited a minute or two the conductor would eventually put down his baton and walk off the podium.

Really!

I think software engineers put these "Easter eggs," little animations and other surprises, into their software mostly for fun, or perhaps in the hope software reviewers might discover them and be motivated to share the fun with their readers (just as I've done here). But in this case I think it also made a nice, if unintentional metaphor; for those willing to invest the time needed to learn the early versions of Finale, there were some great delights in store for them.

Today's Finale resembles these earliest versions about as much as a modern car resembles the Model T. We've made things much easier, more intuitive, and efficient (despite what folks selling other software might say), but we've also retained the original delights, along with the unique power to create anything you can imagine.

One such delight had a less obvious name back in those early days. Remember "Igor's View?" No? Today we call it Scroll View, but it was originally named after Igor Stravinsky. Why? Finale's creator, Phil Farrand, explained that Stravinsky had written scores in a linear fashion. He would put them on the walls of his composing space and walk around writing and editing, going from measure 64 to measure 291, for example, and then back to measure 173.

Not unlike Stravinsky, I like to think that Phil and Finale gave us fresh ways to look at music.

This "linear" view in Finale has been an enormously popular feature in Finale from the beginning. I once heard the facilitator of a clinic at the National Pastoral Musician's convention share his belief that composers and arrangers think differently in this "linear" format than they do when viewing a page. That made perfect sense to me when I first heard it and it still does today.

I've also mentioned before that salespeople for one competitor used to criticize Finale for having both a Page and Scroll view, suggesting this duplication unnecessarily complicated things. Of course, years later this same competitor added a similar feature with great fanfare.

Another odd feature name found in early versions of Finale was called "Deedle-deedle." This too remains a frequently used feature. Can you guess what it's called today?

If so, send me a note by clicking on "Comments" below.

Steve Peha, creator of Petrucci, Finale's first music notation font — Photo by Margot Carmichael Lester

Recently I was asked on Facebook about the origin of Petrucci, the music font used by early versions of Finale. While I know a little bit about Phil Farrand and the origin of Finale (and plan to blog about this soon), I realized I knew nothing of the origin of Petrucci. Although I've been with MakeMusic since 1993, I had to ask a few of the folks who've been here even longer before I learned that the name of the font's creator; Steve Peha. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet I was able to find Steve and was delightfully surprised not only at Steve's generosity in sharing his recollections, but also by the detail of his memories of events that occurred over twenty years ago:

"The font was created much like any other, I suppose. At an early point in Finale's development, Coda realized that relying solely on the Adobe Sonata font was not a good long-term strategy. For one thing, it didn't have nearly enough symbols in it. For another, Phil Farrand, the original programmer, had to practically stand on his head to get things like flags to line up correctly. You should have seen all the 'secret' parameters and 'offsets' that were required to make Sonata work. It worked, but it was obvious that Adobe had no intention of improving it, and that Finale's future development might be slightly encumbered as a result.

I was working on the early documentation at the time with Jim Romeo of Romeo Music and his business partner, and fellow musician, George Litterst. The need for a font arose and as I was fairly competent in the graphic arts, I got the gig.

I had to create the font very quickly. I think I did it in about eight weeks. By contrast, I believe that Cleo Huggins, Adobe's designer on Sonata, had about six months to work with. Petrucci had more than twice the number of useable symbols. At the time, it represented the largest music symbol selection available for a desktop computer.

While the Sonata font was based on the traditional Letraset press-on music symbol set, Petrucci is not strictly-speaking based on anything. I had always appreciated the look of the famous Peters piano editions. I liked the old-style look for classical music. But Finale would, of course, be used for all kinds of music, so something that traditional wouldn't have been appropriate.

Ultimately, Petrucci struck me as something of a hybrid: not 'new' like Sonata, not 'old' like Peters. To be honest, my skills were not sharp enough to truly capture another type foundry's design. Petrucci bears little resemblance to Sonata. Among other things, Sonata is considerably smoother. My ability to place "control points" back then was not what it is today. There's still a little 'hump' on the treble clef that I use to detect Petrucci whenever I see printed music. I must have worked 20 hours to get that hump smoothed out, but I never quite got it right. Other symbols also have unintended irregularities. I guess you could say they add character, no pun intended. In truth, I was in over my head. Petrucci was the first font I ever worked on and I just hoped it would be good enough to get Finale off to a good start. I think it succeeded but I'm also glad that Finale's font selection has improved right along with improvements in the program itself.

I finished the font several months before Finale 1.0 was released. It had to be done this way because Phil needed to tune the placement of symbols under a variety of different circumstances. It took many, many printouts to get everything right, and at certain points, he asked me to make small adjustments to certain symbols, usually to move them up or down by a fraction of a point or so.

The font existed for several months without a name. We had just assumed that it would be called 'The Finale Font' or that Coda would choose a name. But as the program neared release, no name seemed forthcoming. So Jim and I were sitting around thinking about what to call it and we thought about how Aldus had gotten its name from Aldus Manutius, the great printer. So Jim and I tried to figure out who the first printer or publisher was to set music using moveable type. That turned out to be Ottaviano Petrucci. And that's how the font got its name.

Over the years, so many wonderful music fonts have been created that I really think Petrucci is a little 'long in the tooth.' As I said, I was not a great designer at the time, nor did I know much about the subtleties of symbol font design. Up to that point, I had only worked with text fonts and only as a self-schooled graphic artist and desktop publisher. Turns out there are just as many concepts to music font design -- they're just all different.

At the MacWorld Boston release of Finale, I was accosted by this Finnish gentleman who proceeded to give me several long lessons in music font design. This amounted to a litany of things I'd done wrong. However, as the fellow finally conceded, Petrucci was the best font available for a desktop computer program and in that sense he judged it to be at least moderately successful. But he hoped that I would 'fix' it as soon as possible and that I would continue to rev it at least once each year. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Personally, I love the way Finale ships now with so many font choices. As a former jazz arranger, I'm partial to handwritten fonts and I was really excited when those became available. 'Charts' done in Petrucci always drew snickers from the horn players.

The time I spent working on Finale was one of the most exciting periods of my life. And getting the opportunity to create the Petrucci font still stands out as one of the coolest projects I've ever participated in. It's impossible to convey now what Finale represented back then. For years, musicians the world over had struggled to publish music on their computers. But no single program existed that could handle the demands of professional music publishing. I first saw Finale two years before it shipped: I think only two or three tools were functional at the time. But I completely freaked out when, after a few 8th notes in a bar, it automatically respaced them to be more readable. A modest accomplishment to say the least, and yet it totally blew me away. That's how earth-shattering seemed to all of us at the time."

After creating Petrucci, Steve hung up his Bezier curves - he considers himself permanently retired from font design. Since then he has enjoyed a diverse career as a software developer, high-tech entrepreneur, and more. Today Steve is the president of Teaching That Makes Sense (TTMS), an education consultancy specializing in literacy, assessment, and educational leadership.

Last time I talked about "Tom's Top Ten Tips" but only got through three of them. I will get back to the rest, I promise, but first I wanted to share a story with you.

The year is 1988, and it is a cold January night at the Coda Music Software (now MakeMusic) offices in Bloomington, Minnesota. I had started with Coda in March 1987, and was still amazed to be part of this "music and computers" thing. (At the time, Coda was a distributor of other company's fledgling music software offerings.) Perhaps my enthusiasm explains why I was one of the last two people still in the building at 7:00 PM on this particular evening. The other person is Phil Farrand, the original programmer/creator of Finale. Phil is working in an adjacent room, in front of a MIDI keyboard connected to a Macintosh SE30, when he calls out: "Hey Tom, let me show you something I've come up with!"

I enter the dark room, sit behind Phil, and watch. As he plays a piece on the MIDI keyboard, his performance is miraculously notated onto a grand staff on the computer screen. I immediately have a sense that I am watching history in the making. By today's standards the transcription and redraw were slow, and the Mac's screen was tiny, but in 1988 no one had ever seen anything like this before!

The state of the art at the time was Mark of the Unicorn's two programs, Professional Composer and Performer. You used Performer's sequencer functions to enter your music and then transferred the Performer file into Professional Composer to get a semblance of notation. It was quite a process, and the result left a lot to be desired (for example, you could have any kind of beams you wanted as long as they were flat and horizontal). But on this night, before my eyes, the world changed. I was watching a person play music and simultaneously seeing it notated. As I keyboard player myself the repercussions were enormous: "What would Mozart have done with THIS?!"

Over the next nine months Phil continued to tinker, innovate, and amaze his coworkers. On September 16, 1988 he amazed the world with the release of Finale 1.0, but for me the revolution had already started.