Adventures in Music Engraving

My ultimate engraving project

2012-01-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

Does anyone remember the "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz?" I remember seeing this extraordinary piece of engraving hanging on many music school bulletin boards. I had no idea that the fellow behind this work was responsible for two more lesser-known works of the same type. The story behind the man, John Stump and high-resolution scans of his pieces can be found here.

I think it would be a rollicking good time to duplicate these pieces -- they are exquisitely difficult tours-de-force of engraving, on a par with anything Ives has to offer. I will put the "Faerie's Aire" in the queue to be worked on in spare time and will post it here when it's completed.

Curiously, two of the pieces, "Fairie's Aire" and "Prelude and the Last Hope" are hand-engraved (possibly on a music typewriter), and seem to date from the early 70s. The string quartet, though, is from 1997 and looks as though it was produced in Finale (probably v.3ish). The temptation for fonts must have proved too much for him -- several are indiscriminately used throughout. In my reproduction, I will aim for a more restrained expression of the work, if such is possible!

From the Lost in the Cloud blog post referenced above:

Fairie's Aire:

Prelude and the Last Hope:

String Quartet (p.1):

Hammered glissando for percussion

2012-01-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

I was recently required to make a glissando for mallet percussion instruments that asked the performer to hammer all the way through rather than just slide the mallet across the bars. The standard way to indicate articulation in a glissando is to have headless stems with the desired rhythm. This was my first proposal, but it fails to fully capture the requirement:

Since it explicitly requires a rhythm, the performer would be likely to attempt to be precise in its execution. The desired outcome is to have an unmeasured flurry of hits all the way through the figure. My eventual solution was as follows:

The 32nd notes with extended beams suggest that the figure is unmeasured and very fast. The whole note defines the starting pitch and duration of the gliss. The text clearly states the requirement. Result: no confusion.

Update: John pointed out that having the mixed roman and italic text looks odd, especially following the line. I think that a better solution is to treat the text as a technique and have it all in horizontal roman type as follows:

Behind Bars readthrough: Chapter 1: Stem thickness and Center line direction

2011-07-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to the readthrough for Behind Bars. To get started, you can see the previous posts in the series: Introduction and Staves, clefs and noteheads.

In this post, I cover stem thickness and single-note direction.

STEMS

Thickness: Gould suggests that the stems should be thinner than a stave line, but not too thin. I believe that she is quoting Ted Ross here. However, the examples in Ross' book have (to modern eyes) quite thick stave lines. Perhaps the lines had to be scored thicker or deeper in order to stand up to the punching and smoothing process.

Stephen Powell in Music Engraving Today (Brichtmark, 2007) suggests that both stems and stave lines should be the same thickness, but to increase that thickness slightly as the size of the staff gets smaller. Sibelius puts the default thickness of both stave lines and stems at 0.1 spaces; Finale puts the default thickness of both stave lines and stems at .075 spaces.

Edward Tufte, the information display guru, suggests that stave lines are a form of "chartjunk," clutter that obscures the data in an information graphic. In Envisioning Information (Graphics Press, 1990), he recommends printing stave lines thinner and in gray. This has the effect of popping the notes off the page and making them very clear while maintaining the pitch information.

Variations in stave line thickness alter readability

To my eye, Ross' lines are too thick; they imprison the music rather than encourage easy reading. I find that Tufte's approach is very interesting, but may lack feasibility in the real world. The more delicate lines certainly have the effect of putting the notes dramatically frontmost, but care must be taken to ensure that the lines are not so light that they blend into the background or disappear altogether. Inferior reproduction and printing methods will tend to wash out the lines, rendering the music unreadable. Neither Sibelius nor Finale offers a method to easily make stave lines gray.

My recommendation is to stick with the middle ground – stems and stave lines should be the same size, or perhaps the stave lines could be a little thinner to push them into the background more. Experimentation will reveal a balance point somewhere, much like choosing lenses at an optometrist's. It's curious to note that Gould's examples all feature stems and stave lines that are exactly the same thickness, contravening her own recommendation.

Direction: For single notes, the standard convention: notes above the middle line have down-stems; below have up-stems. The middle line is where things get interesting.

Gould surprisingly recommends an option for the middle line: the direction of the stem is determined by the surrounding stems. If there's no clear-cut case for either direction, use a down-stem.

A selection of quotes on the matter:

Read (1969): "When the note is centered on the staff, ... the stem may go in either direction, although it is the more common practice to draw it down."

Stone (1980): "The old rule that the stem direction for notes on the middle line of the staff is governed by the majority of the other stems in the measure ... is rarely if ever followed any longer, at least not by today's professional engravers and autographers."

Ross (1987): "Some engravers consider the middle line neutral, and take the option of using either up- or down-stems for notes that fall on it. However, more up-to-date engraving no longer permits an option; now a down-stem is always appropriate"

Chlapik (1991): "Alle Noten, die unter der Mittellinie stehen werden hinauf-, ab dieser und darüber heruntergestrichen."/ "All notes below the middle line will be up-stemmed, on and above the middle line will be down-stemmed."

Powell (2007): "When there is one note and it is on the middle line of the staff or higher, the stem goes down."

So: why does Gould go back to the old style? I expect she feels that it just looks better: stemming the note with its neighbors assists with the flow of reading and maintains smooth phrasing. What prompted the shift away from this practice? Why is it so bad to have an up-stemmed middle line? None of my sources gives an explanation – does anyone know?

Next time: Stem length and tails!

Behind Bars readthrough: Chapter 1: Staves, clefs and noteheads

2011-06-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

Ground Rules: in which the basics of notation are established and expounded upon. For an introduction to this project, see the first post. Throughout Behind Bars, British naming conventions are in use: stave, crotchet, minim, etc. I shall use her terminology where applicable and revert to standard American where appropriate.

Sections:

The stave [staff]

Clefs

Noteheads

Stems

Tails

Beams

Ledger [leger] lines

Octave signs

Rest symbols

Barlines

Rhythmic spacing

Spacing symbols

The stave:

The stave is the basis for all musical measurement. A stave-space (or, in American, staff-space) is the distance between two stave-lines and serves as a fundamental scalable unit. The stave size may change, but the proportional relationship of symbols does not. We will discuss appropriate stave sizes much, much later.

Almost all music is written on a five-line stave as it is immediately recognizable. The other frequently-used stave type is that of a single line. Its primary use is for indefinite pitch of all sorts and as a baseline to show approximate pitch. Two- and three-line staves are useful in percussion music. Kurt Stone recommends against four-line staves because players can more readily grasp positions on a five- or three-line stave. (p. 216)

Clefs:

Recommended
Percussion Clef

Gould outlines the basic clefs: treble, bass, and the various C clefs. She recommends a double vertical-stroke clef for percussion and notes that it is optional for staves of fewer than five lines.

We will talk about the horizontal spacing of initial items (clef, key signature, time signature and initial note) a little later.

Her recommendations for changing clef are quite thorough and expand significantly on Ross, Read and Stone. Stone notes that clef changes should come one space before the barline and that "there are no specific rules for clef changes within a measure" (p. 46). Ted Ross and Gardner Read have some recommendations, but fall somewhat short of comprehensive.

Consensus rules for clef changes:

Use a clef change where there is an extended constant use of ledger lines
Avoid frequent clef changes (Gould: use up to three ledger lines rather than changing frequently. Preserve the contour of the line wherever possible.)
Use a clef two-thirds of (Ross: two or three sizes smaller than) normal for the change.
Generally place the new clef immediately before the note involved.
If the change affects an entire measure, place the clef before the barline
For mid-bar changes, use the whole beat immediately preceding the affected notes (Gould adds to use half-beats or other subdivisions if necessary.

Gould's additions:

Changes between beats come after rests.
It is better to keep the phrase contour intact rather than to keep to whole beats.
Avoid changing clefs between ties; if you must, use a system break
After periods of rests, change back to a conventional clef at the end of the system after the player has finished. If changing to a nonstandard clef, change according to foregoing rules.

Common clef change situations. Examples adapted from Gould: Behind Bars.

Comments:

Gould’s recommendations amplify the standard texts in very helpful ways. Her central aim is to preserve the contour of the line and disrupt spacing as little as possible. The suggestion to change back from a nonstandard clef to standard is very interesting. When you put the change back at the end of a line, it's almost invisible. The next line starts with the proper clef and the performer doesn’t get the double-take when the new clef appears immediately before playing.

Noteheads:

Black noteheads: oval shape that slopes away from stem.

White noteheads:

Minim (half note): oval shape with diagonal shading following slope of the oval.
Semibreve (whole note): wider oval shape with shading slightly left of perpendicular.
Breve (double whole note): may have two lines, one line or be rectangular in shape.

Diamond shaped noteheads are used for the following functions:

harmonics in instrumental writing
silently depressed keys in piano music
differentiate unconventional techniques
singing through a wind instrument
multiphonics
unvoiced vocal sounds
falsetto

Crossed noteheads are unshaded and fill a stave-space. Steven Powell in Music Engraving Today (Brichtmark, 2007) suggests to use a double-sharp sign in place of unshaded lines because it is more visible on the page. Gould demurs, recommending reserving the double-sharp sign for its role as an accidental.

Showing a minim or semibreve with a crossed notehead is done in one of two ways: a small x in the middle of an unshaded circle the size of a minim or semibreve or as diamond noteheads. I find that diamond noteheads are significantly easier to read.

Uses for crossed noteheads:

notating sounds of indefinite pitch on a five-line stave
to distinguish certain instruments in percussion writing
spoken text
differentiate between speech and singing
showing approximate pitch

Triangular noteheads are used for the highest or lowest possible pitch, where it cannot be specified. It may be black or white depending on duration and does not take a leger line.

Comments:

Gould specifies that semibreve noteheads have a ratio of 2.5 to 3 black noteheads. This seemed off to me. I took several music fonts in current use and compared the sizes of black to semibreve noteheads and came up with a different result. Her ratio works out to .833; the actual number ranges from .71 to .76 with an average of .73. The designers of these fonts need to balance two things: ease of legibility and evenness of color. When the size of the black notehead and half-note is closer in size to the whole note, the page can flow more evenly, but it is subtly more difficult to quickly tell the difference between half and whole notes. If the ratio is too small (and Petrucci approaches this point) the line tends to have hitches in it which impede facile reading.

An interesting side-effect of this exercise is the illumination of the various widths of the fonts. Opus is by far the widest music font and Petrucci the narrowest. Opus' generous space invites easy reading, but Maestro and Helsinki may be better suited to tightly-packed spaces. Sonata and Petrucci are quite outdated at this point and engravers will be better served with other choices. I would welcome comments from those more informed than I on this topic.

Next week: Stems, tails and beams (hooray beams!)

Behind Bars readthrough: Introduction

2011-05-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

Elaine Gould's Behind Bars is a fantastic new reference work on all aspects of music notation. Over the next 6 months, I will be covering a chapter per week, summarizing the content and commenting on various issues that arise in the text. I will welcome thoughts and comments from the community as I progress through the material.

To begin with, the introduction covers three areas: the need for scores and parts prepared with an understanding of basic notational standards, the historical context of this book and a guide for using the book. Her argument for the need for expertise in the principles of music notation is as follows:

Summary: The need for notational standards
If computer software, given a competent user, can produce sharp-looking music, why learn about music notation? The computer can only go so far. It will apply notation principles, but without the knowledge to determine appropriateness to a situation, the result will just as likely hinder the performance as not. "Through a mutual understanding of the rules and conventions of notation, the composer can 'speak' effectively to the performer, who then has the best chance of achieving a faithful interpretation of the composer's intentions"

Commentary:
As an engraver, my goal is to facilitate the communication between composer and performer to the greatest degree possible. My lifeblood consists of these rules and conventions and their proper application. Frequently I find that composers are often extremely good at writing music but don't have a thorough grounding in the layout and disposition of a score and parts. The effect is usually to make performers work too hard to play the music.

Gould notes that in her experience, "professionals are frequently too tolerant of poor presentation." As a performer myself, I know that I almost never have any say in the quality of the part. Indeed, a particularly bad part will be the subject of jokes and bellyaching in the back row, but it will rarely get to the conductor's ears, let alone the composer's. The performer's job is to read whatever chicken scratch or too-small music is put in front of her and play it beautifully. If there are poor page turns, make a copy. If it's too scrunched, squint. When the player is working this hard just to get the music off the page, excellent performance becomes more of a luxury than a given. How much rehearsal time is wasted for someone to ask if a passage should be slurred or tongued like his neighbor? How many questions never get asked and the assumptions and errors made impact the performance negatively? How much new music is never played again because the parts were terrible?

Summary: Historical Context
The next part in the introduction concerns the historical context of this book. Her central point is that established notational conventions provide the most help to the musician because they can be read and understood quickly. In the mid-twentieth century, a wide variety of new notation was created to solve particular compositional challenges. Gould establishes her lineage here: Karkoschka's 1972 Notation in New Music and Stone's 1980 Music Notation in the Twentieth Century. Karkoschka sought to outline the multiplicity of new notational approaches and Stone sought to establish conventions that addressed the needs of contemporary composers. The intent of Behind Bars is to examine the developments of the past thirty years and propose recommendations based on current practice.

Commentary:
I have loved Kurt Stone's book for years. It was a light to me in a world full of arbitrary conventions. Here it was: these are the best ways that we could agree on to notate music. Based on the findings of the 1974 Ghent conference, more than 400 disparate notational methods were evaluated and the clearest chosen. Too often, notation manuals were based on the direct experience of one individual who undertook to poll a handful of colleagues for their input. Ted Ross' 1970 Teach Yourself the Art of Music Engraving and Processing is a wonderful resource for spacing and basic notation, but it's very idiomatic and limited in scope. Gardner Read's seminal Music Notation: a Manual of Modern Practice from 1969 is a monumental effort, but suffers from being from the perspective of a composer and scholar. The ideas put forward are intensely personal and yet presented as being absolute fact. He's done the research, but has come to his own unilateral positions. It also tends to be overwritten and pompous.

One of the reasons that I'm excited about Behind Bars is that it comes from the point of view of a music editor. Her primary goal is to create editions that make money. Assuming that the choice of music is out of her hands, she must produce the finest presentation of that music possible. High-quality engraving says to the purchaser that the utmost care was given to the production of the edition and they will be assured of a smooth and enjoyable performance of the music. To that end, she is concerned with what is best for players and how to make the work as consistent and dependable as possible. Her thirty years of experience in the field and the production of uncounted thousands of diverse scores give her the authority to make solid recommendations. Of course, the viewpoint of one person lends itself to idiosyncratic pronouncements. She acknowledges a wide variety of experts in various fields that have helped her form opinions. The result is a carefully-considered, well-presented reference work that has clear, thoughtful recommendations for an extraordinary range of situations.

Summary: Using Behind Bars
The book has a clear hierarchy of headings with related subjects grouped and cross-referenced. Topics are structured "definition -- design -- placing -- use" and progress from elementary to complex. Technical terms in other languages are presented if in common use. Items are illustrated with good and bad practices.

"Effective communication results from establishing a convention and adopting a consistent approach." Any new recommendations are simple, clear and based in traditional practice when possible.

Commentary:
I'm looking forward to going through this book with you and exploring the current state of music notation and how it differs from and complements my own current understanding. Adventures in Music Engraving indeed!

Dramatically enhancing Sibelius' keypad

2010-09-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I was reading about interface design and came across Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. His ideas about quasimodes intrigued me to a great extent and I thought Sibelius' keypad would be a great place to apply the technique. The short version is: whereas the caps lock puts the keyboard into a capitalized mode, the shift key puts the keyboard into a capitalized quasimode. You have to hold down the shift key for as long as you want caps, so you are always aware of what mode you're in.

With the keypad, I can switch to different layouts to do different things with the same key (in the F8 (basic) layout, the 1 key gives me a 32nd note; in the F11 layout, the same key gives me a fermata). The problem came in when I forgot what mode I was in. Sometimes, I would want a 32nd note, but mistakenly apply a fermata instead. To avoid this, I reset the keypad every time I use it (F8 or shift + numpad+). Therefore, when I wanted a fermata, I would reset the layout, then press numpad+ 3 times (or press F11), press 1, then reset the layout again: not very efficient.

I wrote a script for AutoHotkey that automatically returned to the basic layout after I used the desired function. For a fermata, I would press and hold F11, press 1, and then release F11. That way, I always knew what I was entering.

After using this system for a couple of years on a Windows machine, I switched to a Mac and found my beloved AutoHotkey would not follow me to the new computer. The degree to which I had grown dependent upon this new behavior in Sibelius was striking. I had forgotten just how annoying it was to reset the keypad before and after every use. It seemed like every error I made was due to the keypad being on the wrong setting.

Today, though, I found ControllerMate. With it, I was able to quickly duplicate the desired behavior in the OSX environment. It has been refreshing never to have to worry about the keypad again! I hope that the Sibelius developers include it in a future build, but I'm happy that I can both have and eat cake on any system I choose.

To be clear: this change to Sibelius' keypad is among the best gifts you can give yourself, right up there with an 88-key keyboard and enormous monitors. It is entirely worth the effort and is highly recommended.

Supplemental Material:

Terrific article about quasimodes

AutoHotkey

ControllerMate

You can download my setup file for ControllerMate here. It is based on the Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (USB) and requires Sibelius' keypad layouts to have the following keyboard shortcuts: Basic: F14; More Notes: F15; Beams/Tremolos: ctrl+opt+cmd+w; Articulations: ctrl+opt+cmd+v; Jazz Articulations: ctrl+opt+cmd+z

The AutoHotkey script I wrote follows: copy it, put it into a text file and rename it *.ahk. Then execute it with AutoHotkey.

--

;Quasimode hack for Sibelius keypad states

~F9::
KeyWait, F9
send {F8}
return

~F10::
KeyWait, F10
send {F8}
return

~F11::
KeyWait, F11
send {F8}
return

~F12::
KeyWait, F12
send {F8}
return

--

Optical note spacing

2009-08-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

I recently obtained a book by Herbert Chlapik entitled Die Praxis des Notengraphikers, or (roughly – my German is tenuous at best!) The Practice of the Music Engraver. With a little help from Google Translate, I'd like to present his description of optical note spacing. Neither Sibelius' nor Finale's spacing algorithms take this into account, so every instance must be corrected by hand.

Optical Compensation

Every typesetter or graphic designer understands that the different letters, especially capitals, require their typographical design be taken into account. It is an optical phenomenon that

uniform spacing between letters in certain combinations creates precisely the opposite impression. Only kerning – introducing a a small expansion or contraction between letter pairs – creates an optical illusion that suggests complete uniformity.

Though unkerned pairs in may be perceived as ugly, the readability is not affected much. This may in fact be the case with music notation as well. The widely disparate forms of musical symbols and their position to each other tends to cause irregularities which are disproportionately larger than those found in a line of text. The spacing between the characters is defined by the rhythmic structure and must assist the musicians' spontaneous comprehension. Notes must therefore be spaced not just according to their calculated position, but also so as to be visually correct.

An optical compensation must be made in the following situations:

1. When stem-up and stem-down notes are next to one another.

2. If there is a (lower) stem-up note after a rest.

3. Cross-staff beaming [this is a subset of the first case]

As examples 1–3 show, one does not calculate the distance between the notes, but between the stems. This seemingly-erroneous calculation of the note spacing causes the optical illusion that looks correct to the eye.

4. Large intervals.

Reduce the space between large intervals by about a third.

5. For the space between stem-up short-value notes and the barline.

The space between the last note and the barline should be slightly larger than the exact calculation.

Only in multisystem situations is the optical compensation improper because it can cause distortions in the other voices.

[Here he discusses vertical spacing between staves. In short, the uppermost and lowermost characters on adjacent staves define the closest possible distance between them. Any extra space left over after all the staves are spaced may be equally distributed.]

Since it is impossible to show all variants of the optical compensation, examples must be limited to the essentials. The trained eye can find other situations where a slight compensation would give a better visual result.

The translation (such as it is) is mine, but the text and images are copyrighted 1987 by Ludwig Doblinger (Bernhard Herzmansky) KG, Wien – München. Published here under the fair use provision of section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

Toward Engraved Braces

2008-04-30T09:01:00.001-07:00

Treat braces as first-class citizens

As I was working on duplicating braces from the 1960s, I realized an important limitation of both Finale and Sibelius. Both programs use a single stretched shape to handle all possible staff widths. The implications are clear: for staves that have narrower or wider spaces than the symbol was designed for, it becomes distorted and ugly. My solution? Replace the single shape with several shapes specifically designed for a range of distances. The program should dynamically swap them out as staff distances change.

Computer fonts have a similar problem. If a font is designed to look good at 12pt, it will look too thin at 6pt and too fat at 72pt. Type companies, realizing this, release versions of high-end typefaces that are appropriately-weighted. Six-point caption-weight fonts have thicker lines and are slightly wider. Seventy-two-point heading fonts have a greater difference between thick and thin lines and have more delicately-pointed serifs. Adobe has an illuminating article on this practice here. The computer won't do it for you, though. It's up to the layout designer to know about the issue and select an appropriate typeface for the job at hand. For music engravers, the choice is not quite so easy.

How did they do it before?

For much of the history of music engraving, braces were set using differently-sized punches. Each punch size would be individually crafted to have correct proportions. With the advent of photographic reproduction and dry-transfer sheets, manufacturers began to cheat. Instead of having individually-designed braces, different sizes would be taken from one master symbol and optically reduced or enlarged. Very small and very large braces continued to have their own symbols. By the time computer software started to be written, I surmise that memory limitations and programming expediency led to the one-symbol solution. Since it is generally innocuous, it has persisted to the present day.

Let's do it right.

"Generally innocuous" does not excellent engraving make. You can see in the image below what happens at large and small distances. Sibelius scales a little better than Finale, but the braces are still distorted. If one were to apply this kind of stretching to a familiar character, one can immediately see the violence done to the letterform. As the level of stretching increases, the line weights become increasingly out of proportion. With the Boosey braces, two strategies are employed. The brace at the left is the model; the middle brace is an optically-reduced version of it. The smallest brace is a unique symbol. This is the strategy I recommend to the MakeMusic and Avid.

There should be four or five unique braces, each tailored to look good for a particular range of staff distances. Each brace should be uniformly scaled to match the specific staff distance. As distances change, different symbols should be swapped in. The number of unique symbols should be enough that its extremes are not noticeable (a brace designed for a 1-space gap would look funny enlarged to fit 4 staves). This would produce the highest possible quality for these delicate and graceful symbols.

Stravinsky redone

2008-04-24T05:11:00.001-07:00

I've remade the Stravinsky pages so that they are a close match to the 1967 Boosey & Hawkes re-engraving of the 1947 revision. My original pages were based on the Dover reprint of a 1965 Moscow edition that had many errors. Take a look and let me know what you think!

It was an interesting exercise to copy the old engraving. The biggest lesson I came away with was that the old guys really, truly, thoroughly knew their stuff. Every single one of the pages in that edition is a beautifully-set prime example of the engraver's art. Here is a scan of the two pages that I copied.

One of the trickier parts was emulating the type style. They used a version of Century that I could not duplicate very well. The closest I could come was Century Old Style. The problem arose when trying to set type like instrument names or performance directions. They had access to a type weight roughly equivalent to caption -- about halfway between regular and bold. This is a type weight intended to be set at about 6pt and be readable. I chose to use a bold weight for the instrument names and the regular weight for performance direcitons. Even though the thin parts of the font are a bit light at this size, it still created a reasonable look.

Another tricky thing to duplicate was the braces. I posted earlier about trying to recreate these braces in Finale, failing, and having to use Illustrator only to find that Finale's graphics importing doesn't work so well. Even though it turned out that I could duplicate one size of the braces in Finale, stretching that shape to encompass different vertical staff widths distorted it considerably. One of the little signposts of the older engraved style is braces that don't quite match the top and bottom of the enclosed staves They would have several sizes of braces available and match as closely as possible. To preserve that look, I surveyed the pages and found that there were three distinct braces. The larger two were simply scaled versions of each other, but the smaller one was a unique shape. After creating the three types of braces in Illustrator, I brought my pages into InDesign so that I could position them correctly.

Since exporting a PDF from InDesign rasterized the pages and decreased the quality somewhat, I resorted to a fairly circuitous workaround. After removing the pages from the InDesign file, I exported a PDF with just the properly-positioned braces. I then overlaid that file on top of the original PDF exported from Finale. This method preserved the desired vector graphics while achieving authentically-sized and -positioned braces. It's a very small touch, but I think it adds a lot to the feel of the pages.

Post below if you have any comments or questions and I'll do my best to address them.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 6 – Wrapping it up

2008-04-24T00:43:00.001-07:00

(You might wish to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 first.)

*note - this is a fairly long post in which I talk about Finale's interface and underlying mechanics, some things the program does well, and the miserable situation brought on by marketing needs. Have fun!

What have I learned about Finale?

I've been reacquainting myself with MakeMusic's Finale 2008 over the last couple of weeks and have come to a new appreciation of the software. I have a much greater familiarity with the kind of thinking that created it and the market pressures that have made it what it is today. I am also much more comfortable entering and editing music within the confines of the system. At this point, I would rate myself conversant, but not yet to my level of expertise and efficiency in Sibelius. I've had to achieve many graphic effects the hard way. The plus side is that I now have a much deeper understanding about how the underlying programming works and can use that to my advantage in the future.

Tools and Modes

At its core, Finale is a program from the late 1980s that has persevered mightily. Over time, it has accreted new features and refined some of its more glaring flaws, but its basic way of doing things hasn't changed much in 20 years. Every aspect of the program is compartmentalized, which lends itself very well to a particular style of workflow. If you want to 1) enter notes, 2) add dynamics and directions, 3) add slurs and lines 4) layout the page and tweak positions, Finale works fine. The advantage to this kind of tool-based design is that working on articulations doesn't affect slurs and lines; adjusting spacing for one measure doesn't necessarily affect the spacing of any other measure. It serves as a mental focus – to make the user contemplate only one aspect of the music at a time.

The downside is inherent to the design. Because the user can only deal with one aspect at a time, switching between many tools to accomplish a given task is often required. The recently-introduced Selection Tool simplifies the process; I can drag most items, and a context menu allows basic edits to be made. Double-clicking any given item generally switches to the appropriate tool. However, creating any item requires the user to be in a particular mode.

Aza Raskin at Humanized wrote a very useful discussion about the dangers of modes here. The basic gist is that having to stop and recognize what mode the system is in before taking an action interrupts the train of thought. Resuming the task after determining the mode adds a cognitive burden, even to experienced users. Incorrectly determining the mode of the program causes a mode error – if I think the program is set up to input articulations when it is actually in Expression mode, holding down H and clicking a note will produce a sf under the note, instead of my desired harmonic diamond above the note. To avoid such an error, I will tend to clear the current tool by pressing ESC, and then select the desired mode of entry. These interruptions of the train of thought make editing music in Finale much more about the system used than the flow of the work. (Happily, Finale does have some quasimodal inputs – using the right click + drag to move the score around is a prime example)

With that said, it is certainly possible for experienced users to produce quality work quickly. Getting in the flow of the program and knowing how things work goes a long way toward increasing efficiency. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcana of music engraving. No computer program can be a perfect engraver – a well-trained and judicious eye is necessary for high-level output.

Experience and Automation

In years past, engraving a page of music required the precise hand-positioning of every single mark on every single page. From page numbers to slur curvature, there was no such thing as feasible automation. Typeset music could never match the nuance and subtlety of a page engraved in tin or composed from acetate rub-offs. When computers came into use for engraving in the 60s and 70s, hand-positioning of every symbol was still required. As software became more sophisticated, an increasing percentage of the page could be automated. Today, many standard engraving rules are followed without the user's input. Many modern users don't even know what "casting off" means, because fitting measures of music on a staff is not only automated, but so easily modified. Getting it right the first time is simply no longer necessary.

Finale poses a particular challenge. On one hand, I should be able expect the program to follow the most basic engraving rules. Stem lengths and directions, beam angles, instrument name positioning, etc. On the other hand, I am responsible for every mark on every page that leaves my workstation. Generally average to poor automatic placement on Finale's part means that I can take nothing for granted. Every line has to be carefully nudged into place and reexamined periodically to ensure that it hasn't been repositioned without my input. Every beam and every articulation has to be adjusted slightly. What ends up happening is that the very automation that we prize from the software as time-saving in fact requires us to spend more time making sure that it doesn't screw things up. Sometimes it feels as though Score users have it right – very little automatic anything. Sure, it may take a little longer, but it's right the first time without any second-guessing.

So, do you like anything about Finale?

Compared with Sibelius, the typography, slurs and instrument/group bracketing are significantly superior. Handling of text expressions is a wholly different approach that involves a tradeoff. Finale includes a limited drawing module and Sibelius does not. There is a general sense of being able to adjust many more settings with finer granularity, though I'm not sure how far that goes.

The basic typography in Finale won't win any awards, but it does include some crucial adjustments that Sibelius sorely lacks. Kerning is the most important of these. Being able to adjust the individual spacing between letters allows the engraver to correct prominent text so that it flows better. Individual-character baseline-shifting and super/subscript are other welcome settings.

Text expressions are an odd beast in Finale, but offer some unique advantages over Sibelius. When one enters an expression, one must choose between selecting an existing expression and creating a new one. This system creates a master list of all expressions in the score. Every time one places an f, one just invokes another instance of the master f. So if you want to change something about every given expression in the score, one simply goes to the list, makes the change once and it is propagated throughout the score instantly. To make a change for just one instance, one must create an entirely new expression. This method allows a very fine global control over the positioning and text content of all of the expressions in the score. (This also belies the program's beginnings in the late '80s – this approach saves a lot of memory in big scores.)

Sibelius, on the other hand, uses a system of text styles. Each text object is a separate container that inherits a particular style's properties. If the style changes, so does the format of the text. Individual expressions must be altered individually. Text styles can help ensure a consistent look throughout the piece. Both programs' systems involve tradeoffs. Finale requires micromanagement to make sure that every expression conforms to a consistent style (did I make stacc. and marc. both 12pt Times italic?). Sibelius requires micromanagement to make sure that each expression is properly positioned and consistent with others of its type (did I have "a2" or "a 2" earlier?). In the end, this one comes down to personal preference.

Finale's drawing module, the Shape Designer, is unique to the program. It allows custom vector graphics to be precisely created and placed in the score. Even though the module is redolent of early-90s MS Paint, it is possible to create some quite complex images. It's possible to create some rudimentary shapes with Sibelius, but for any degree of difficulty, it's far preferable to use a third-party program like Illustrator.

I've talked in some detail about Finale's instrument grouping and slurs before, so I won't retread here.

Marketing Pressures

MakeMusic has been in a bind for quite a while. They are saddled with a program with an archaic interface and an entrenched group of expert users who rely on it for their livelihood. They are in business to make money. Music notation has ever been a niche market in a niche market. Music engravers are an even smaller share of that already miniscule market. Their strategy has been twofold – market Finale and its associated products to educators, composers and recording artsts and release upgrades every year. This strategy reliably results in gimmicky features tacked on to the program for every release. Instead of fixing core issues with the program, they spend their development time and money on being able to input notes via guitar or microphone and automatically add dynamics. Now I can add an audio track to a score and mix the volume and panning of individual staves. I understand why they think they have to jazz up each new version with something, anything, to get more new people to buy the software. Finale's yearly upgrades at $119.95 (or $169.95 for those who are bad and skip years) have been described as more akin to leasing the program rather than owning it.

It is not just MakeMusic's desire to attract new users that inhibits any true innovation. Finale's expert users have become accustomed to the many quirks of the program. Dramatically changing the interface would alienate them. Instead of going through and stripping out old, obsolete code and building a fresh program, they are forced to keep supporting the last 20 years of users and files. To correct the most egregious faults, they have taken to including certain plug-in packages rather than going through and actually fixing them.

Here's an image for you: Finale is a man riding a rickety unicycle holding a large basket of watermelons. He has been doing this all day every day for many years. His clothes are threadbare and the unicycle is in need of a new inner tube and probably new spokes wouldn't hurt. The watermelons at the bottom of the basket are rotting a bit. Periodically, his manager comes along and tosses a few more watermelons on top of the heap.

What you're supposed to do is lose the watermelons and get the guy a shower, a shave, a new suit and a bicycle. Or maybe a Maserati. What you're not supposed to do is decide that maybe cantaloupe would look more enticing on top of the basket.

So what's the verdict?

Finale is an immensely powerful program that can accomplish virtually any given musical situation. However, the interface and underlying workings of the program are clumsily-updated holdovers from the 1980s. Barring a substantial shift in marketing strategy from MakeMusic, it is likely that future updates will follow their well-established pattern. As Sibelius improves its fine-tuning capabilities and steadily encroaches upon Finale's market share, more and more music publishers will start preferring it. Right now, though, it is the dominant software and I am well-served by fluency in it. I can only hope that MakeMusic takes a good, hard, look at what they have and make their next release a leaner, faster, better system rather than more watermelons on the basket.

The braces issue - fixed!

2008-04-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

I posted my dilemma regarding braces on the MakeMusic forums. A kindly soul took a look at my brace and managed to make it himself just using the editor in Finale's Document Options. Somehow in my previous efforts I missed the setting marked "Center Thickness," which was the catalyst for all of my adventures in Illustrator and Photoshop.

While I am now able to achieve my desired braces in Finale, this does not excuse the truly miserable time I had trying to import graphics. Maybe it's just me and the combination of software and hardware I have on my system. Maybe I did or did not check a particular setting when creating my images.

Oh well. At least it works now.

Of course it works like that.

2008-04-19T03:14:00.001-07:00

As soon as I posted that last screed, I tried a few more combinations of export options. I got a magic combination!

In Illustrator, Export as TIFF, set the colorspace to Grayscale, 600dpi resolution, anti-aliased, IBM-PC byte order.

Or not. Crap. I just tried to save, and it bleeped at me several times saying that it didn't support LZW compression. When I closed and tried to reopen the file, the brace was gone.

Have I done something really wrong to deserve this?

Oh cool. Now it just blanks out the graphics as soon as I place them. What a fantastic piece of software.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 5: Graphics aggravation.

2008-04-19T02:45:00.001-07:00

(You might wish to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 first.)

From brackets to braces

Maybe the best time to write about problems I'm having with Finale is not immediately after I've given up. I'll go into some detail, but the punchline is: Finale's graphics import feature is horribly, horribly broken. Really, horribly, horribly broken. I mean it. I will also preface my remarks by saying that I can, in fact, import scanned images. It's just all the rest of them I'm having problems with.

Let me paint a scene for you, dear reader:

I am trying to duplicate a particular older style of bracket. It looks like this:

You'd think this wouldn't pose a huge challenge, right? You'd be wrong. Very, very wrong. Why? Because everything is many times more difficult to do than it needs to be.

Gamely, I decide to brave the braces editor within Finale. After futzing around with it for a while, I realize that I can't alter the point in the middle of the brace. It's permanently fixed at zero width. This is fine for virtually all circumstances except mine. I also realize that this is a setting that probably fewer than four people have ever noticed existed.

I will insert the disclaimer at this point that it is actually impossible to tweak brace curves in Sibelius as it is simply a stretched font character. One can change the font for the brace or tweak the actual font character itself, but it's not exactly built into the program. I would have to take the next step to achieve the desired result in Sibelius as well.

As I am fairly set on getting this particular brace style, I load up the old standby, Adobe Illustrator. It is the work of ten minutes to create a suitable brace. My copy looks like this:

Pretty good, don't you think? I thought so.

The game is: let's import something into Finale. You are not the winner!

Let the fun begin. Getting this brace into Finale, a feat which I have yet to accomplish satisfactorily, has taken the better part of an hour of effort.

Try 1: copy the shape from Illustrator into a new document in Photoshop. Save it as a TIFF. Try to import into Finale. I get a rectangle in the shape of my image's bounding box filled with rainbow sparkles. My jubilant attitude starts sinking.

Try 2: Save the same file in Photoshop without layers. Same result. My smile turns upside down.

Try 3: Save the same file in Photoshop with a Mac byte order. Same result. My smile turns inside out.

Try 15: export the shape from Illustrator as a Legacy EPS file, version 8. No font embedding. Upon importing, it somehow mass-duplicates across my page in a frenzy of gibberish. Exciting, but not exactly my goddamn brace.

Try 30: Print the Illustrator file as a PDF, then import the PDF into Photoshop. Rasterize the image. Save as a TIFF. Import to Finale. Now it just gives me a black box. I have long since become the staring-ahead mechanically-trying-different-combinations-
of-random-crap guy.

Try 60: Export the Illustrator file as a WMF (Windows Metafile). Import into Finale. Magically, there before me appears my long-sought-after brace! I am momentarily ecstatic until I realize that a jagged travesty of my brace has usurped the rightful position of my lovingly-tweaked beautiful curves. I print the page (on paper!) to see if it is just a screen artifact. It isn't.

I still have the option of printing the brace on paper from Illustrator, scanning it in, then importing the file into Finale. But then I would have to deal with paper artifacts on the finished file. It may just come down to that.

By the way, I just tried to import one of my many TIFF files into Sibelius, just for funsies. No prizes for guessing what happened.

I am displeased. Very displeased.

Finished the Stravinsky

2008-04-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

A quick update: I have finished the two pages of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that I set out to engrave in Finale. I have a bunch more to write on the subject, but you can see the finished product here if you like. I'm quite proud of the results as it was a fair struggle at times to come to terms with the software's curiously intractable quirks.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 4: Tremolos

2008-04-16T03:30:00.001-07:00

(You may wish to read Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 first)

Are you trembling with excitement...or fear?

Well, the love-fest couldn't go on forever. Dealing with tremolos in Finale is like extracting one's own molar with a rusty Allen wrench. Now, I'm sure I'm going about everything all wrong and the myriad experts out there who know everything there is to know about quickly working around the various broken systems in MakeMusic's funhouse will smile and shake their heads in bemusement when they read about my trials. May I ask a favor of the imminently-bemused? Tell me where I'm going wrong, please! Things can't possibly be as bad as they are…can they?

Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). I needed unmeasured single-note tremolos and unmeasured trill tremolos. These are two entirely different devices, but Finale manages to make them both a headache. To create a trill tremolo, one must either run an included plug-in (TG Tools Easy Tremolos Lite), which works well enough, or make one from scratch. Making a tremolo from scratch is, as you might expect, a royal pain. The procedure for making two half notes connected three beams in the space of one half note is, briefly: create two 32^nd notes, define them as a tuplet that is two 32^nd notes in the space of one half note with a hidden number and bracket, change the noteheads to half notes, and insert a gap between the two inner beams with the beam extension tool. Pause to catch breath/mop sweat off of brow.

"Easy" Tremolos

The Easy Tremolos plug-in automates all the steps up to inserting a gap. It has the added benefit of being able to take two notes of any duration and replace them with an appropriate tremolo that fits in the space. It can also optionally insert hidden notes that will play back correctly. The full version of the plug-in includes options to specify beaming styles and gap size.

The catch is: if you don't know how the plug-in works, editing your brand-new fancy tremolo will be a complete mystery. The manual has only this to say about making tremolos: "run the plug-in!" It includes no discussion about how to go about it any other way. In fact, the manual is actually misleading – the accompanying illustration shows a tremolo with gapped interior beams. The plug-in as installed will only produce connected interior beams. I needed gaps on my tremolos and only figured it out how to do it by examining the finished ready-made tremolo closely.

By the way, to do the same thing in Sibelius, one must simply create two quarter notes and press the tremolo button. Yes, the tremolo button. One can easily choose between different numbers of beams and beaming styles. It works perfectly in nearly every circumstance.

In a future post, I will examine the degree to which Finale has become dependent on hacks, plug-ins and workarounds to solve pervasive and enduring problems with the software, but for now, let us move on to unmeasured single-note tremolos.

Tremolos on single notes

To create an unmeasured tremolo is ostensibly simple: create the appropriate articulation and attach it to the desired stem. In fact, one can apply the tremolo articulation to a whole region of notes at once very easily. The sticking point (and you knew there was a sticking point, didn't you?) is in the default behavior of such an articulation. On stemmed notes, the slashes attach so that the furthest slash from the notehead is nearly flush with the end of the stem. Furthermore, the slashes are not centered on the stem. Rather, they are off to the notehead side a bit. While this positioning tends to look pretty bad, the default position of a tremolo on a whole note is ridiculous, tending to completely obscure the notehead (the stem on a whole note is very short!)

One may object, "But you can fiddle with all of the positioning parameters so they can be exactly to your taste." This is true, and the following settings do a much better job than the defaults. If I try to change the vertical offset, the articulation moves relative to the end of the stem, not relative to the notehead. If I change the setting to "Auto note/stem side" with a vertical offset of -2.4 spaces, newly-created tremolos will attach to the notehead and be reasonably positioned. This also happily fixes the centering issue. However, it attaches to the first notehead in a chord, so oddities can be expected. (This also looks somewhat less dumb on whole notes.)

None of this changes the fact that adding an articulation to a note does precisely nothing to the length of its stem. When three (slightly smaller than) beam-sized slashes go through a stem, one likes to see a wee bit more than a little nubbin sticking out over the top. For every note affected, one must go through and manually lengthen the stem to accommodate the tremolo. If you're like me and you don't like simple wedges on any beam, anywhere, you must be prepared to go nudge every single one of those articulations into the correct position.

By the way, to do the same thing in Sibelius, one needs only to turn to the erstwhile tremolo button and press it. Imagine. It just works right. Stems are lengthened; slashes are properly positioned and easily modified. It's enough to make a man want to switch programs.

Next time: more "fun" with articulations.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 3: Some accolades (!)

2008-04-15T05:19:00.001-07:00

(You may wish to read Part 1 and Part 2 first)

Sibelius' instrument names make me sad.

It can't all be doom and gloom on Finale, right? The program must have some redeeming qualities or engravers would have abandoned it long ago. Happily, it does a few things much better than my beloved Sibelius – things that the Brothers Finn would do well to emulate.

The approach to instrument names is quite different between the two packages. Sibelius fairly limited in this regard. It handles all the basic needs competently, without much need for adjustment. When more complicated situations arise, especially instrument names between staves, the support breaks down fairly quickly.
You can see in this image that it is possible to achieve nearly identical results with both programs. Both names are centered between the staves and each individual staff has its own name, properly centered as well.

Getting to this point is a fair hassle in Sibelius. First, one must create staves for the appropriate instruments and label them individually. In this case, (1,2) and (3). Happily, at this point, one can ignore them, for they will always update their positions properly. Then, one must create the group name (Cl. in Bb) as a separate piece of text for every single system upon which it is to appear. The singular difficulty with this approach is that every time the measures are reflowed, the instrument name might end up floating randomly in the middle of the page. Furthermore, should staves be repositioned vertically, the text will become slightly off center, as it will maintain its position relative to one staff, not the center of both staves. The solution to these issues is to wait until the very, very last moment before the final draft goes out and go through the entire score and position each name by hand. This is kind of a drag.

Why Finale is better (gasp!)

Setting up Finale's staff and group names is straightforward enough, but the important thing is: once it's set up, one never has to deal with it again! Step one, much like Sibelius, is to define staff names: here, (1,2) and (3,4). Step two, something Sibelius should do, is to define group names (Tpts. in C). One is able to independently set horizontal and vertical positioning relative to the precise center line between staves. One can even set line spacing on a two-line group name (e.g. Vlns. II/div.) and have both lines contract around that center line. When I saw that, I smiled a lot! Once one has set these names up, they behave correctly throughout the rest of the score without prodding.

To be sure, Sibelius can automatically center names between staves. The problem arises when one tries to have both a staff name and a group name. The manual suggests creating a single, centered piece of text that includes all the information. This is quite simply unacceptable. (Click the image to read all of the shocking text!)
You will note that they even acknowledge the inherent flaw in this solution – the staff names "will get slightly mispositioned if you change the gap between staves from the default." I need as much flexibility as possible when setting pages. Being locked in to one staff distance for an entire piece is not even an option, so far as I'm concerned. My solution retains flexibility at the cost of extra time spent at the end of the project. Were I to work in Finale, there would be no extra time needed.

Oh slurs, you're my only friends!

Finale's Smart Shapes (™®, probably) are generally equivalent to Sibelius' Lines with one striking exception. Finale's slurs are amazing. Pure and simple. They are a joy to use. I don't say this about much in that program, but in this case, they are truly stunning. It's not just that they automatically avoid stems, beam shoulders and accidentals or generally choose the correct side of the notes to fall on, although that's fairly impressive. It's not just that I can set a wide range of options for default behavior.It's all about control. The kind of control offered by this editing frame should explain my enthusiasm.

Being able to independently tweak the arc, shoulders and endpoints of the curve, even to make s-slurs with complete confidence almost makes up for the reams of crap Finale throws at me daily. As I was putting together these Stravinsky pages, I ran into a couple of spots where my long history with Sibelius made me instinctively brace myself for a long, drawn-out battle with the slurs. Miraculously, I just put the slur where I wanted it. And that was it.

Now, Sibelius' slurs are fine. They get the job done fairly well, but adjusting them is sort of like playing the piano with mittens. I can certainly get in the ballpark of what I want, but when push comes to shove, sometimes the program pushes a little harder than I'd like. I can only drag one point of the slur at once, so more complicated passages require a fair amount of massaging before I'm satisfied. S-slurs, while certainly possible on Sibelius, are a major undertaking to get right. Adjusting one side of the arc tends to mess up the other side in spectacular ways. Coaxing these slurs into position is not my idea of a fun afternoon.

I've set two identical passages here to illustrate the difference. I've done my level best to make Sibelius' slur as good as possible. It's not bad, but there's still a hitch where the two halves join. Add to that the odd sharp hooks at the end of the slur and you have a functional, but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing object. Finale's slur, on the other hand, arcs gracefully around the various features and has a smooth join in the middle. Finale's implementation of Bézier curves here is very similar to Adobe Illustrator's. Illustrator has been in the business of manipulating such curves for 20 years and their approach is immaculate. Sibelius needs to get with the picture on this one.

I've spent enough time with Sibelius to know its little quirks and flaws. When Finale completely nails something that the other does poorly, it's something of a double-edged sword for me. On the one hand, it is lovely to see and work with a properly-implemented feature. On the other, it makes me look forward to the time when Sibelius can finally put all the pieces together to create the—dare I say it?—ultimate music notation software. Until that day, we must accept the various problems inherent in the available tools and work around them as well as may be possible.

Next time: tremolos. What the hell were they thinking?

Sub-Sub-Bracketeering

2008-04-12T00:17:00.001-07:00

What's a sub-bracket?

It's not often that I feel like I've explored every aspect of a problem and come up empty, but in this circumstance, the feeling is warranted. The subject is instrument sub-brackets. To bring us all up to speed on this tiny bit of arcana, please examine the examples (click for a larger version) and away we go!

In full scores, instruments are bracketed according to group, then subgroup, then (very rarely) sub-sub-groups. In the example before us, we see the flute section from the Rite of Spring. The big bracket is for woodwinds, the first sub-bracket for flutes, and the sub-sub-bracket for Flutes 1 and 2,3. In older scores, sub-brackets were frequently drawn as braces (the curly bits to the left of piano staves) rather than brackets. Neither Finale nor Sibelius handles these situations very well, but MakeMusic's software does a better job than Avid's.

The crux of the matter for me is the gap between brackets and staves. Please notice on the original that the sub-brackets do not go through to the staves. The hook on the sub-bracket stops when it intersects the larger group bracket. The sub-sub-bracket's hook stops when it intersects the sub-bracket. This particular style is possible only with great effort in current engraving software.

Is there a generally recommended style?

In my entire collection of standard engraving reference books, the issue is barely, if at all addressed. Ted Ross mentions only one sub-bracket, Gardner Read indicates a preference for braces instead of brackets, and the usually reliable Stone doesn't even mention brackets at all in connection with scores. In many published scores that I have examined, this seems to be a choice colored by region, date and publisher. So it is not surprising, perhaps, that neither Finale nor Sibelius offers the option to specify the length of the sub-bracket's hooks. (I am not familiar enough with Score to render an opinion, but my understanding indicates that such a specification is possible.)

That said, Finale is the only package capable of delivering usable sub-sub-bracketing. Finale's system of grouping offers much finer control than Sibelius does. I can define an arbitrary number of staves to be part of a staff group and assign any of six bracket options. I can individually adjust the line thickness, distance from the left hand of the staff and adjust the top and bottom of the bracket. With these tools, I can create sub-sub-brackets that behave correctly under any given circumstance, even though the hooks run through to the staves.

I'm sorry if this is getting too nitpicky, but one of the reasons that Finale is often touted above Sibelius is the near-infinite adjustability of items. I'll continue at risk of losing some of you.

Mind the gap?

Finale's sub-brackets have a hook length of about 1.5 spaces. This means that I can achieve the desired gap by simply moving the sub-bracket over so that the hooks are buried inside the big bracket. The problem, as should already be apparent, is that the sub-bracket now sticks out too far. To extend the technique to the sub-sub bracket results in an uncomfortably oversized mass at the left edge of the staff. The only option, therefore, is to have brackets that protrude through one another – a valid choice, but one that I would prefer to have left up to me.

Sibelius doesn't offer much control at all over bracketing. I can only feasibly create one level of sub-bracket. The only adjustments available to me are the distance from the left of the staff, the number of staves enclosed, and line thickness. Even so, it might still be possible to implement a solution similar to Finale's, except for one thing: the distance from the left of the staff is a global variable. All sub-brackets are equally affected, affording me no way to differentiate a sub-sub-bracket. Further, no matter how far left the sub-bracket is positioned, the hooks always connect to the staff. This makes it impossible to maintain the gap even on the single sub-bracket allotted me. The only way I was able to accomplish the above example is by creating a one-off line and manually positioning it.

In fact, the only way to achieve the desired effect in either program is through painstaking and fussy effort. In Finale, I would be required to define a specific bracket shape expression and attach it to the appropriate position on every page. Such shapes would not update to changes in either staff distance or measure reflow.

My conclusion? Live with the brackets going all the way through to the staves. It's not worth the substantial effort needed to effect such a minor detail. I do prefer the cleaner look afforded by the gap, but not enough to go through the hassle.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 2: the initial gripes.

2008-04-11T01:56:00.001-07:00

(read Part 1 first, if you like)

The Title

Well, crap.

Right off the bat, I ran into an annoying bit. The title of the movement I'm working on is ВЕЛИЧАНИЕ ИЭБРАННОЙ (The Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One). As I don't have a Cyrillic keyboard and my Russian is a little rusty, I went for the Character Map and laboriously chose the sequence of characters, being very careful to match them to the original text. You may imagine my surprise when instead of my beautifully concatenated characters, ?????????? ????????? appeared when I pasted the title in. ????????? does not make me happy.

After messing around, trying to get the alt+numpad ascii codes to work instead (they don't), I searched the MakeMusic forums (thanks, guys!) and found my solution. It turns out that Finale does not and has never supported Unicode fonts. This means that all of the standard codes that define particular characters past the first 256 just plain-old-do-not-work. The only way to get past this, apparently, was to download a clipboard converter. This would take the gibberish (to Finale) and translate it into something it could recognize (in this case, the Cyrillic subset of Times New Roman).

I was not best pleased that my initial foray was being rebuffed so vigorously. It took something like 45 minutes to figure this whole business out. Remember, this was typing the title.

The Tempo

My second order of business was to put in the tempo marking. This was my second mistake. I've posted a picture of the required tempo at right. I'll grant you that it isn't the simplest of tempi, but still, not something that should be the cause of a major headache. Blithely pressing forward, I attempted to create the sign in the text edit box, only to find that I couldn't even make two beamed eighth notes with the font EngraverTextT. Undaunted, I went for the manual, which proceeded to instruct me to make an extra staff, compose the needed notation, make it into an ossia measure, then hide the scratch staff. To me, this sounded like an unnecessary hassle and one that would precipitate more hassles down the road with extracted parts.

As it turned out, the ossia tool has apparently been neglected over the last decade as staff styles have developed (Thanks again, forum guys!). The ossia tool is amazingly crippled. Not only can't it deal with more than one bar of music at a time, it doesn't display ties. I'll repeat that last part. It doesn't display ties. Since my fancy-pants tempo mark needed a tie, and the whole reason I was messing with this extra-staff business was to get a tie, the fact that it arbitrarily doesn't display ties left me feeling bemused and wondering more than ever what I got myself into.

At this point, I threw up my hands and faked it. I simply made the text expression with two quarter notes next to each other. On the Piccolo and Violin I staves, I added two whole rests as symbols to make the beam. Since I didn't see the hanging tie character in any of the fonts I looked at, I went back to a Sibelius font I knew and defined a new symbol. The resulting hodgepodge looked fine, but extracting parts would be a misery.

What do you know? Learning is fun!

As I was typing this, however, I am a couple more days into this project and have wrestled with the text editor a bit more. I have discovered Finale's wonderfont: MaestroTimes. It includes such fun characters as a small 1 over a small 2, for easy staff names. It also includes many different beamed notes for assembly in the text editor, not to mention the coveted hanging tie symbol. Armed with my new knowledge, I was able to quickly whip up the needed tempo mark with virtually no hassle at all.

It seems like the documentation hasn' t been updated materially in a very, very long time. Even so, I can remember back to when I was learning the program for the first time. It told me to define tempo marks "q = 60", where "q" was in the Petrucci font. This invariably ended up with a gigantic quarter note and tiny text. I cannot imagine what was going through their minds when they recommended that approach. To this day, I still see amateur work done in Finale with that enormous quarter note.

I will chalk this all up to a learning experience instead of any significant flaw in the program. I was eventually able to achieve all of the graphic components I required. Next time: I discover a bug that nobody has ever talked about before. Ever.

(Re)Learning Finale, Part 1

2008-04-09T23:14:00.001-07:00

From Finale to Sibelius

I've been a Sibelius user for 10 years or so, since v. 1 for Windows. However, my music engraving education began on Finale, two or three years before that. My band director at C.S. Porter Middle School, Tim Aston, showed me Finale 2.0 on his computer at school. The idea of putting music on paper thrilled me to no end and I dived into the software immediately.

My father is a well-known composer and gamely gave me first a simple project to work on, then increasingly more complicated ones. As I worked with Finale, I became more and more frustrated with the annoying hand-tweaking that the program required. At first I tolerated it because I was learning the program and I would figure out a better workflow as I went along. Things never got better, though. I got faster and more accurate, but the fiddly nature of the program remained. The incremental updating of the program didn't help. By version 3.7, it had become clear to me that Finale would never fundamentally change, that it would simply keep adding dumb features (studio view, anyone?) without ever seriously addressing its core notational difficulties. To this day, the automatic beaming in Finale is pretty miserably broken. Their only fix: include the venerable Patterson Beaming plug-in with the program.

In high school, I learned about this new program called Sibelius. I ordered a demo disc and installed it with great anticipation. From the very first moment I loaded it, it was love. All of the stuff I hated about Finale was magically not an issue. Sibelius offered an implausibly clutter-free interface with a natural, intuitive method of interacting with objects. Imagine: clicking on anything gave me the power to edit it. No more trying to figure out if that mf was a score expression or a note expression. Imagine: I could select a region of music and apply tremolos with three keypresses. Sibelius automatically lengthened stems and correctly positioned the slashes. I could even type directly onto the page and get a real-time sense of how the text would fit with the music.

On that day, I gave Finale up forever. Sort of.

Why go back to Finale?

As I have had more and more frequent encounters with publishing companies over the years, it has become apparent that the bulk of the work in the industry is done with Finale. Not to be expert in the software would be tantamount to the kiss of death for an engraver attempting to expand his practice. I decided that the time had come to once again acquaint myself with the long-shunned program. One of the reasons that precipitated my decision was Steven Powell's excellent Music Engraving Today, 2^nd Ed..

He presents a well-reasoned discussion debating the merits of the two software packages. He concludes that, while Sibelius is better organized and has a shorter learning curve, Finale is a better choice for an engraver. While I don't agree with several of his points, two are significantly compelling. First, although Finale's text engine isn't perfect, it offers many more typographical options than Sibelius' fairly rudimentary handling. Second, Finale's slurs are head-and-shoulders above Sibelius'.

As I installed and executed Finale 2008a.r2, a familiar feeling stole over me – memories of weary fights with an intractable opponent. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe 10 years of development would have streamlined the interface into something usable. Maybe it would finally be a joy to use.

The following posts will present my journey as I relearn Finale. I am engraving two pages from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as it contains some significant challenges and will make me touch most areas of the program. As I was going through Powell's book, I noticed that his comprehension and manipulation of Sibelius was, while competent, hardly extraordinary. I feel very much that I am in the opposite position here. Undoubtedly there are faster and easier ways to accomplish virtually anything that I'm about to do on Finale. I hope that any experts reading this will comment and let me know! So now, I'm off!

Go on to Part 2!