Last weekend I was in my garden pulling weeds. I expected my wife to be delighted with the results, but she sadly informed me that I’d removed some “good” plants as well. They looked the same to me!

Or, rather, my expertise wasn’t such that I could tell the difference. So, with that in mind…

What’s the difference between these two measures?

“Nothing,” you say.
Okay, I agree, they do look the same, but the measure on the left contains a default whole rest while the measure on the right has a “real” whole rest.

What is the difference?

• A default whole rest is purely visual, and one that Finale automatically places in every blank measure.
• A real whole rest is an entry—something you placed in the score—just like a note or any other kind of rest.

In other words, Finale starts out every piece with default whole rests, and these change to real whole rests only when we consciously enter a whole rest. Because the default rest doesn’t quite have the clout of something you’ve intentionally entered, they work differently:

• Lyrics, articulations, and other note-attached items cannot be attached to a default whole rest.
• Only a real whole rest can be moved (in either Simple or Speedy Entry).
• Only default whole rests can be consolidated into multi-measure rests.

The lesson learned from the third bullet above? When creating a score from which you’ll want to generate parts with multi-measure rests, don’t enter real whole rests; just leave those default whole rests alone.

As I re-read what I’ve written above I suspect that someone is going to read this and think, “Dang, now I have to keep track of what kind of whole rests I’ve used,” and that’s not the case. For most of what we do in Finale it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The only time it matters is when you plan to make multi-measure rests or are having difficulty attaching items to a whole rest. My approach is to only enter real whole rests when I know I want to attach something to them. Done!

Should you ever need to change a real rest to a default whole rest, simply click on a full measure or group of measures and press the backspace key (Windows) or the clear key (Macintosh) to make sure it contains only default whole rests. If you need to convert multiple rests, there are two related plug-ins in the Note, Beam, and Rest Editing folder called “Change to Default Whole Rests” and “Change to Real Whole Rests.”

Would you like some more detail on their use or anything else in this post? Please let me know 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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

Last week my wife, a director of nursing at a major medical institution, came home jazzed about new technologies in health care. She had just seen a demonstration of voice recognition technology that allows nurses to literally “talk to the walls” rather than hand-charting their patient evaluations and updates.

As she described the demonstration, I was transported back nearly twenty years ago when voice recognition technology began to first reach home computer users. The dream was to control your computer by voice command, ala Start Trek. (I am reminded of Scotty’s scene in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” where he picks up the mouse and begins talking into a Mac SE30. When he realizes he has to still TYPE in his commands, he says, “Oh, how quaint!”)

In the early 1990s, the leader in voice recognition was Articulate Systems. At this time Finale and Articulate Systems did many events together where their voice recognition software was demonstrated in use with Finale. Among the venues were MacWorlds, Gand Music Tech Expos, and NAMM conventions.

I recall one specific NAMM show meeting where this combination was demonstrated to great effect by my friend, Christopher Yavelow, a gifted composer and author widely known for his keen insight on the future of music and computers.

Chris got up in front of a large group of music dealers and said; “Open Finale,” and it opened!

“Under STAFF go to Add Staves. Type 3.” Sure enough, Finale added 3 staves! In fact, Finale did whatever he told it to do. (As is sometimes the case with new technology, the trick in demonstrating it was to focus on what it did rather than what it didn’t do.)

At the end of his demo, Chris shouted; “ERASE HARD DRIVE,” then quickly added “Stop!”

This got a big laugh.

Well, here it is 2010, and most of us aren’t using voice recognition with our music applications. I don’t know if this is because the technology simply didn’t advance as quickly as we would have liked, or if voice recognition simply isn’t all that practical for mainstream use. 

Kids of my generation were promised all kinds of technology that similarly never materialized as we imagined, and this is a subject of Daniel Wilson’s book “Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived.”

I recall hearing a piece about the book on NPR, but have yet to read it. Have you? Let me know what you think of the book, voice recognition software, or anything else tangentially related to Finale by clicking on “Comments” below.

In the meantime I’m still dreaming of the day when I can tell Finale to “Compose music in the style of Igor Stravinsky — his early period.”

Ah well, a guy can dream.

The Finale 1.0 box (which held three manuals and more) and the Finale 2011 Quick Reference Guide

Finale has had many different user manuals in the course of the last 22 years. As I’m looking at the new Finale 2011 Quick Reference Guides (Mac and Windows in a small back-to-back booklet), I am amazed at how far Finale has come, not only in its maturity and depth, but also in its ease of use.

Back in 1988 Finale 1.0 included three books that rivaled the Manhattan Yellow Pages in size and weight. Like the program, they were a bit dense and complex: Their bulk certainly didn’t create an impression of being easy to use. They did, however, contain a lot of helpful information. The “Tutorial” volume walked you though sample projects to get you started. The “Reference” volume let you look up any item you encountered in a menu or a dialog box and learn exactly what it did. The “Encyclopedia” volume was my favorite – it listed musical terms alphabetically (so you’d find “crescendos under “C”) and explained how to achieve them.

A new set of manuals was created for Finale 3.0, and these were written by David Pogue, who has since become a technology columnist for The New York Times, a tech correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning and CNBC, and the author of many For Dummies books. (Finale trivia: Some say characters in his novel Hard Drive resembled members of the Finale team…)

The 3.0 manuals were, in my opinion, much better written and organized than their predecessors, but they still came in three large volumes which must have represented a significant percentage of the worldwide paper industry output in those years.  Further complicating matters was that we continued to update the software faster than we could update the manuals, so we would create additional printed “addendums” for our users to lug around.

The next phase occurred with the release of Finale 97, when the User Manual became electronic and integrated within the program, so even when you were on your laptop at the coffee shop, you had access to the entire user manual. The electronic version was also searchable AND easily updated. At the same time the printed materials were reduced to one slim Installation and Tutorial Guide.

Finale 97 clearly represented several steps in the right direction (especially from the perspective of trees), and over the years the electronic component has become more and more refined and augmented by our web-based Knowledge Base, QuickStart Videos,  and a world of support offered on-line. I like the fact that when I invoke the user manual from within Finale today, Finale looks to the web (to access the latest version) but if web access is not available it will automatically reference a locally installed version without any action on my part. This seems like a great implementation, allowing users to be connected to, but not dependant on, the web. Updated Tutorial, Reference, and Encyclopedia information can all be found electronically these days – they can be searched individually or all at once – and they are always up to date.

Finale 2011 represents the next sea change in documentation in the form of the new Finale 2011 Quick Reference Guide. Different than a tutorial, it offers quick answers for how to complete common tasks, and as such is more likely to be referenced again and again, instead of just in the first few weeks of use. The information is presented in a graphic format so you can see at a glance how to do things without reading a lengthy text description, and everything is presented in an amazingly easy-to-understand manner.

If you haven’t seen the Quick Reference Guide you can get a quick peek here, or you can order Finale 2011 or a Finale 2011 upgrade today; both the upgrade and the full version include this handy guide. I think it’s a great way to learn to use software, but then I’m not holding any paper industry stock.

Let us know what you think of the new Quick Reference Guide – or anything else – by clicking on “Comments” below.

For many years I have traveled to Frankfurt, Germany in the cold of winter to attend Musicmesse, the largest music convention in the world. It is an international meeting place. As I do at every show, I have made many great friends there over the years and look forward to seeing them again on each visit.

I remember meeting one such friend many years ago: Walter Ratzek, a fantastic pianist and conductor. I met Walter though our mutual friend Karl-Heinz Klemm, proprietor of Klemm Music Technology, which distributes Finale in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

I can recall Walter describing to me his dream of a Finale that included linked parts: He wanted to be able to make an edit in the score and have the same edit occur in the parts, and vice versa. I agreed it sounded like a fantastic time-saver and a great idea.

A few years later in 2006, Walter calls, explains that he and his entire family are touring America, and asks if we could have dinner together when they visit Minneapolis. Of course! We decide to meet at a restaurant at the Mall of America (North America’s largest shopping mall) because the Mall is already on their itinerary.

We were a little late the night we raced off to meet Walter and his family. We parked in a hurry and raced through the mall to get to the appointed restaurant on time, where we were greeted by Walter, his wife, and their kids.

Our two large families were seated at one banquet-sized table, and we had a great, great night. I’ve always delighted in opportunities for my daughters to interact with folks from different cultures, and I’ve come to love Germany so much that it all sort of came together for me that night.

We were intrigued to learn that Walter and his family were not fully prepared for how large America really was once they began to drive around it. They had thought that four weeks would be enough time to do a circle trip from coast to coast and in the end they had to hurry a bit to make it all happen.

For my part I had big news to share: Finale 2007 had just been released and it included Walter’s dream of linked parts. Of course we made a toast and Finale 2007 was duly christened.

When dinner was done we said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways. As my family walked back to our minivan, I began to search for my keys and was startled to not find them. As I continued to pat down my pockets, my daughters ran ahead and were dismayed to find it was not locked. A quick inspection confirmed that nothing was missing, however. In fact, we found the keys in the ignition. Think that’s embarrassing? It gets worse—the van was still running! I’d left it running, unlocked, during our entire meal!

I suspect no one stole it because they couldn’t believe anyone could be that stupid: It had to be some kind of car theft sting operation, right?

What does this have to do with Finale? Not much really. But for me the whole dinner was a great example of the kind of links that Finale has made possible for me – the linking of score and parts, sure, but also the linking of two cultures in laughter and camaraderie.

I’ll end with one final link. Since this dinner our friend Walter has steadily moved up in the ranks of the German military band – check out an impressive YouTube video of Walter conducting in Moscow by clicking here!

Have a Finale linking story? Share it by clicking on “Comments” below!

Every December for the last twenty years or so I have represented Finale at the Midwest Clinic – the annual International Band and Orchestra Conference held in Chicago. While in the process of talking about Finale at this show, I’ve developed countless friendships over the decades, and look forward to seeing many familiar faces there each year.

Among those faces are Winona and David Holsinger. Talking with them is one of the highlights of the show for me: in part because of my admiration for David as a composer, but also because they are both such delightful people. David loves to talk Finale and always has some suggestions he’d like to see in future versions. Today two specific examples come to mind.

David has a penchant for writing great rhythms: 5/4 and 7/4 are old friends to him. If, like me, you’re a fan of his music you know it simmers and moves with a rhythmic insistence that is quite unique. I have a vivid recollection of him requesting, long ago, a faster way of indicating both a time signature and the desired beaming.

I wish I could have seen his face the first time he right-clicked on a time signature in Finale 2006 and saw this expanded contextual menu:

Options like 5/8 (2+3) and 7/8 (2+2+3) just strike me as soooo David-esque!

More recently, I wish I could have seen David’s face when he first saw the Finale Percussion font included with Finale 2011; I recall him requesting just such a font.

For today’s blog post however, I’d like to recall a specific visit to the Midwest Clinic back in December, 2008. As I arrived in Chicago on Thursday, I was looking forward to the warmth of all the friendly faces to counteract the cold, blustery weather. When I awoke early on Friday, however, I discovered that I had no movement in my left hand, and it didn’t seem to be getting better as the morning passed.

As a pianist, this was a less-than-ideal realization. I showered, laughing as I attempted to wash my hair with a limp hand. While I have a very strong “the show must go on” work ethic, a call to my wife, who is a critical care nurse with a doctorate in nursing, confirmed that I had better take a cab to Northwestern Hospital instead of the tradeshow floor as I had planned.

There I was diagnosed with something called “honeymooner's palsy.” Yup. Apparently some newlyweds, rather than move their sleeping partner off their arm, will endure a night of discomfort only to wake up with some nerve damage. This can also occur to folks who’ve drunk too much and fall asleep in what would otherwise be a painful position. While neither situation described my previous night, I was nevertheless relieved to learn I hadn’t had a stroke, but still a bit apprehensive about the prognosis that I’d probably be fine in a few weeks – or months.

I left the hospital in a bit of a daze to find a text from David:

“The world has too many one-handed concertos already. Get Well!”

This bit of humor was very welcome that day. In time I made a full recovery.

While December is very far off, and I’m not eager to trade snow for today’s sunshine, I’m still looking forward to seeing David, Winona, and everyone else at Midwest again this year As always I’ll be all ears for suggestions of what anyone would like to see in future versions of Finale.

Did Finale 2011 contain answers to items on your Finale wish list? Please share by clicking on “Comments” below!