Stravinsky redone

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

(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!

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.

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

(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

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

(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 (!)

(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?

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

(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

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!