The Shape Designer
Every now and then, you’ll run across a
musical situation for which there’s no standard notation. Maybe you’ll
want to insert a diagram into your score for harp pedaling, or musical-theatre
staging, or an unusual instrument posture. For those situations, as well
as for modern, alternative-notation scores, Finale has a built-in drawing
program called the Shape Designer. You visited the Shape Designer in the
previous tutorial, but this time you’ll really find out what it can do.
To acquaint you with its features, in this exercise you’ll create a special diagram as part of a note to your flutist.
- Scroll
to measure 20.
- Click
the Expression Tool and double-click above measure 20. The Expression
Selection dialog box appears.
- Click Create. The Expression Designer dialog box appears.
- Click the Shape radio button and then click Create. You arrive in the Shape Designer.
At the top of the window are twelve drawing
tools.
Let’s say that you want a special effect—you
want the flute rotated 90 degrees and played vertically.
In the steps below, the units shown in the
H: (horizontal coordinate) and V: (vertical coordinate) text boxes are
measured in points (72 per inch).
- From
the Shape Designer menu, choose “Rulers and Grid.” The Rulers and
Grid dialog box appears.
- Click
Points, then click OK. You’ve just set the measurement units to
Points.
- If
no grid points appear in the drawing area, from the Shape Designer menu,
choose Show, and then Grid. Grid points now appear in the Shape
Designer drawing area.
- From
the View drop-down list, choose 200%. Everything on the screen
now appears twice the size it will be in the score.
- Click
the Rectangle Tool . You’re about to draw a tall thin rectangle that will
represent the flute itself.
- Starting
on the origin, click and drag straight up and to the right until H: is
about 4 and V: is about 36. Release the mouse button. The origin
is the small white circle at the center of the screen. You drew a rectangle,
all right, but it’s too thick to look like a flute. That’s easily remedied:
- Click
the Selection Tool , and then click the “flute” rectangle. Black handles
appear. From the Shape Designer menu, choose Line Thickness then choose
Hairline. “Hairline” thickness is .25 points.
In the next step, you’ll create a curved arrow
to indicate that you want a rotation.
- Click
the Curve Tool . Starting to the right of the rectangle, click and
drag down and to the right to create a curve. A shallow, downward-arcing
curve appears. (If you had dragged to the left, you would have created
an upward arc.)
- Click
the Selection Tool . Click on the curve that was just created. Three handles
appear that govern the positions of the curve’s endpoints and the arc
of the curve itself. Drag these handles until the curve looks like this:
To change its line thickness, click the line
once and then, from the Shape Designer menu, choose Line Thickness and
then select a different thickness.
Next, you’ll add an arrowhead to the curve.
- With
the curve still selected, click on the Shape Designer menu and choose
Arrowheads. The Arrowheads dialog box appears. We want to add an
arrow to the start of our curve.
- Click
on the drop-down menu next to Start and select Preset Arrowhead.
In the Preset Arrowhead Selection dialog box, click on Select to choose
the first arrowhead. Click OK.
If you want to preserve the spatial relationship
between the curve and the rectangle, you can group them into a single
unit. With the Selection Tool, click one object, then -click
the other. From the Shape Designer menu, choose Group. From now on, these
two objects will be locked together as though they’re a single object—until
you choose Ungroup from the Shape Designer menu, of course.
As a final step, make a textual notation to
the hapless flutist:
- Click
the Text Tool . Click to the left of the “flute,” and type “Tilt
flute straight up.”
- If
you want the text to wrap onto two lines, as shown above, press after the first two words. To change the type style,
select the entire text block using the Selection Tool, and choose Select
Font from the Shape Designer menu.
- While
pressing (Mac: ), click OK. You return to the score, where your special diagram appears
near the measure you clicked. Drag its handle to adjust its position.
You may not have much everyday need for the
vertical-flute shape you just drew. But the Shape Designer will come in
handy for creating doits, harp diagrams, enclosures, logos, and other
special notational cases. For more information on using the Shape Designer,
see Shape Designer in the User Manual.
In this section you’ll learn to use some
of Finale’s most powerful scoring and notation tools.
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