Staves

Noteman says: See Working with instrument staves for a step-by-step tutorial on adding, removing, and reordering staves.

As in most sheet music, the staff is Finale's basic unit of vertical organization, just as the measure is the basic unit of horizontal organization. Understanding how staves work and mastering the essential tasks related to staves are among the fundamental starting points for working in Finale. Staff is sometimes used interchangeably with instrument, although they are not always the same. A piano, for example, includes two staves. Adding, removing, and editing staves is generally handled in the context of working with instruments in the Score Manager. See Instruments for more details on Finale's definition of an instrument.

For information on specifying whether or not a staff should be displayed, see Hiding staves.

Adding, selecting, and deleting staves

Changing the order of staves

Moving and evenly spacing staves

Noteman says: View the Positioning staves QuickStart Video for an overview.

You can move staves in several different ways. First, you can choose to either adjust staff positioning for a single system or for every system in a document. Second, you can choose whether to move a staff and all lower staves, or to move the staff independently of the other staves. When you drag, Finale displays the distance from the top of the staff you are moving to the top of the previous staff. The units are whatever you’ve selected using Edit > Measurement Units.

Staff spacing is an important part of determining your final page layout, in combination with system scaling. See also Reducing/Enlarging.

Adjusting staff properties

See also:

Staff names

Staff groups

Measures

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Finale 2014 for Windows

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