Tag: editing

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Finale Note Spacing, Beat Spacing, Beat Groups & Time Signature Spacing

Q: I am using Finale 2011, and I am having a music spacing issue. If I am inputting beamed notes, and add an accidental, the space between that note and the one before it becomes unnecessarily larger, and the beamed notes are no longer evenly spaced.

Unchecking the “Avoid Collision of Notes and Articulations” has no effect on the spacing whatsoever. I have viewed several Finale scores that lead me to believe that even spacing with accidentals is possible, but I am at a loss as to how to accomplish it. Have you any ideas for solving this issue?

A: In addition to the spacing parameter controls found in Document Settings>Music Spacing, Finale has three different types of automated spacing: Note Spacing, Beat Spacing and Time Signature Spacing. Additionally, Finale provides a way to fine tune the spacing between individual note objects.

Let’s take a look…

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Featured Finale Plugin – JW Staff Polyphony

If you are a longtime Finale user, chances are you know who Jari Williamsson is. Jari has maintained the Finaletips.nu site for a number of years and is a prolific Finale plugin author.

One of Jari’s latest offerings is an amazing multi-purpose music notation plug-in for tasks related to exploding music, merging music, working with layers, chord voicings and more called JW Staff Polyphony.

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Creating Instrument Changes in Sibelius

Q: I have a score with percussion parts defined as one line staves. However, I want them to be five line staves. The only thing I could find in the Sibelius Reference is how to address this situation when you are first creating instruments. How can I do this?

A: Fortunately, this one’s pretty easy. It’s done with the Instrument Change feature in Sibelius.

sib-instrument-change

Go to the beginning of the score. In Sibelius 6, go to Create > Other > Instrument Change. In Sibelius 7, choose Change from the Instruments panel of the Home tab. Select “Percussion, 5 lines”. Ok the dialog. The cursor will be loaded blue. Click to the left of the first bar for the one line staff you want to change.

Note that you can also use instrument changes anywhere within a piece, for instance, to change Flute to Piccolo or Oboe to English Horn.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it.

~robert

for Laura

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Sibelius Gap Before Bar – A Positive Feature With Negative Offsets

Q: I have a very strange Sibelius error that I can’t fix. The piece I am working on shows brackets in the middle of a system that I cannot delete without that all the brackets in the whole piece get deleted. I don’t remember how it ended up there, and I am sure I saved the file in a normal state. After opening it, though, it was like this:

 

Any idea what happened and how I could fix this?

A: Sibelius has a little move handle that appears when you click in a certain place just to the front of a staff:

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Controlling Symbols, Hooks & Dashed Extension Lines in Sibelius & Finale

Q: I am currently studying Elaine Gould’s “Behind Bars” and on page 30 she states: “Terminate the octave transposition with a corner”. In Finale, octave lines seem to automatically end with a corner whereas in Sibelius the line finishes as a vertical stroke which the writer advises to avoid.

How can I make a proper corner at the end of the extension line in Sibelius, if at all possible?

A: Both Finale and Sibelius by default use line strokes rather than shapes to create both the horizontal extension line and the vertical end “hook” for the Octave up and Octave down symbols and other lines.

Both programs also allow the use of a Symbol to end a line, so you can end a line with an  arrowhead, corner or any other shape. The advantage of using vector lines for this is that it allows the engraver to precisely mate the line width of the extension line and the hook very precisely so that the line and hook appear to be an extension of the same line.

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Instrument Name Positioning in Finale

As a professional music copyist, I’m always interested in the alternate solutions and workarounds that composers and arrangers use in Finale to achieve specific tasks. Instrument names is an area where I’ve seen a number of interesting workarounds.

If you review typeset works by different publishers, you’ll discover there are several different concurrent standards for placing instrument names in a full score. My goal with this blog post is to show you the proper way to achieve these standard placements in Finale, and hopefully, ultimately save you some time in the bargain.

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