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.

1. Click the Page Layout Tool  . The Page Layout menu appears.
2. 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.

3. 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). 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.

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