In my last post, I suggested a tricky use of Finale’s Chord Analysis plug-in, where we used it to create some solfège syllables. This week I thought I’d show you a more common use of the plug-in, namely to automatically add chord symbols to your score.
Let’s say you’re preparing some holiday music and you need to quickly come up with some chord symbols to help a guitarist play along on something like this:
To automatically add chord symbols:
- Choose the Selection tool and indicate the measures where you’d like chords to appear. Want them to appear in all measures? Type CTRL-A (COMMAND-A on Mac) to Select All.
- From the Plug-in menu (the “plug” icon on the Mac), choose “Scoring and Arranging>Chord Analysis.”
- Above I’ve specified that I’d like a chord symbol on “All down beats,” and that I don’t want to “Allow repeated chord symbols.” I also deleted the two question marks following “Show unknown chord suffix as.” Had I left them in, I would have seen the “??” whenever Finale was uncertain about a chord suffix.
Here are the results:
I think that’s pretty slick; while you might occasionally edit the results here or there, this plug-in gets you in the ballpark fast!
What do you think? Please let me know by clicking on “Comments” below!