… music notation tips & tutorials by experts in this field.
Have you noticed that a typical internet search doesn’t always produce relevant results for music notation? For instance, if you do a Yahoo, Bing or Google search for “articulation”, you’ll get dozens of results, with none of them related to Finale or Sibelius, and only a handful related to music . . .
I hope you find this to be a useful resource…
more >> “Find Plugins & Information about Finale & Sibelius QUICKLY”
This tutorial is also available for Sibelius.
I recently typeset a piece of music for children’s choir and percussion. The percussion part, which was on three different instrument lines, needed to be as clear and readable as possible for the kids performing. The publisher requested that we use percussion pictographs instead of abbreviated text for the percussion instrument names after the first system:
I thought this would make an interesting tutorial, useful for worksheets and other specialty applications (like my kid’s choir project). I hope you agree. Let’s take it from the left edge…
more >> “Finale: Use Percussion Pictographs for Staff Names or Instrument Changes”
Finale supports as many as 18 different clefs within a single score, and as we’ll see, allows you to modify existing clefs and even create your own.
This is the continuation of a previous post: Octave Displaced Staves in Concert Scores with Transposed Parts in Finale. As you will see, Finale’s Clef Designer feature is very flexible and powerful.
FINALE’S CLEF DESIGNER
Finale displays music notation intelligently relative to each clef’s definition. If you change a clef, Finale will correctly re-notate the music and also keep track of the playback pitches. Any new clefs you create appear in the standard palette of eighteen clefs (replacing existing clefs).
Finale 2014 and earlier offer “octave clefs” which allow instruments like Piccolo or Contrabass to play back at the correct octave in concert pitch scores. (These look like treble or bass clefs with a small 8 above or below them.) However, modern common practice for concert pitch scores is to use standard bass and treble clefs for octave-displaced instruments.
The good news is, it’s easy to swap out the old-style octave clefs for the regular bass and treble clefs in Finale while retaining the correct octave-offset playback for specific instruments. Let’s take a look.
Before reading this article, please see: Concert Pitch, Transposing and Octave Displaced Instruments : A Prelude.
Instruments which are not considered “transposed” per se, but written in a different octave than where they sound are referred to as octave-displaced instruments. Examples of octave-displaced instruments are Glockenspiel, Piccolo, Guitar and Contrabass.
CONTEMPORARY CONVENTION
The current convention for scores in Concert Pitch specifies that instruments which transpose at the octave-only be displayed at their written pitches, e.g. mostly within the staff, rather than requiring numerous ledger lines.
Reading a full score is complicated enough without forcing the conductor to always count ledger lines!
Additionally, in modern scores, It is understood that instruments such as the piccolo, guitar, contrabassoon and contrabass sound an octave above or below where written, and so the small reminder number 8 (or 15 if two octaves) above or below the treble or bass clef has fallen out of popular use.
If you think about it, the convention of written pitches makes a great deal of sense; The Glockenspiel sounds two octaves (15ma) above where written; the highest written note for Glockenspiel, C above the staff, requires nine (9) ledger lines to display at concert pitch!
more >> “Octave-Displaced Staves in Concert Scores with Transposed Parts in Finale”
A clef is a musical symbol placed at the beginning of a staff to indicate the pitch of the notes on the staff. “Clef” is the French word for “key”. Clefs first started appearing in music scores in the late 1500’s as letters placed precisely on a specific staff line to identify letter-named pitches, which provided a “key” to their identity.
In modern music, there are three main clef designs / shapes we use for pitched music, plus some ancillary clefs used for percussion instruments, tablature and so forth.
Music scores, whether orchestral, concert band, big band, or a pop chart etc. typically contain a variety of differently pitched instruments. Because factors like instrument length, size and acoustical properties affect each instrument’s range / tessitura, certain instruments need to be written transposed, in a different octave, or both to produce pitches in common with other instruments.
This system of written pitch notation allows the music to remain largely within the staff for each part as well as the transposing score. Instruments written in a different octave than where they sound are referred to as octave-displaced instruments.
Additionally, it is common practice in Concert Scores to show octave-displaced instruments at written (rather than concert) pitch. This allows these instruments to be notated largely within the staff. (For Finale users, more on this later.)
TRANSPOSING INSTRUMENT TYPES
Regardless of whether a pitched instrument produces its sound by vibrating metal, membranes, strings or air, it falls into one of the following four transposition / octave displacement types:
more >> “Concert Pitch, Transposing and Octave-Displaced Instruments : A Prelude”
UPDATE: If you have updated to Finale 2014, take a look at the new Keyless Scores feature which is related to the issues covered in this post.
Q: I’m formatting a Timpani part with key signatures hidden. The score contains a number of keys changes / signatures. The timpani part itself is fine with all accidentals in place.
However, I need cued notes from other parts to appear in the Timpani part. The source parts all show key signatures. I used the TG Tools Add Cue Notes… plugin to make the cues, but none of those accidentals appear in the timpani part. For example, the flute is in the key of G major, and has a passage with F-sharp in it. If I cue that passage in the timpani part, Finale doesn’t show the sharp to indicate F#.
I can’t believe this is an uncommon problem. How can I globally make these diatonic accidentals appear in a part without Key Signatures?
A: As you are already aware, historically, Classical scores displayed some instruments without Key Signatures. Timpani and French Horn are probably the most common of these “keyless” instruments, although you will find examples in the repertoire for Trumpet and even Clarinet.
For Timpani, since it is not a transposing instrument, one would think that all you’d need to do to hide the key signature is to uncheck Key Signatures in Items to Display of the Staff Attributes, and any diatonic accidentals would then automatically appear in the staff:
However, to see how this really works (and how it doesn’t), let’s (1) define a Key Signature, then (2) set our Timpani not to display the Key Signature as above:
(3) Now, enter some notes using your MIDI keyboard. If you enter a sequence of non-diatonic naturals, you get (redundant) naturals displaying on every note; if you enter notes that are diatonic to the hidden Key Signature, the accidentals aren’t displayed at all, neither of which is very useful:
So, as you can see, simply hiding the Key Signature isn’t really an ideal solution at all. If you’ve already entered music in the staff with “Items to Display>Key Signatures” unchecked, there is a partial solution for showing accidentals more correctly after the fact, which I will cover at the end of the blog post. But first…
more >> “The Convolutions of Hidden & Independent Key Signatures in Finale”