Eric, both of your solutions are quite cumbersome. All you need to do is set the staff to use Chromatic Transposition instead of Key Signature Transposition in the Staff Attributes dialog box.

But I think Chuck was asking what pitfalls exist when using Chromatic Transposition. The biggest problems are:

(A) chord symbols attached to staves set to use Chromatic Transposition do not automatically transpose. So if he copies chord symbols from the piano part to the soprano sax part, he will need to transpose the chords manually using Mass Edit -> Change -> Chord Assignments.

Please complain about this to tech support. God knows I have. Maybe one year it will actually be fixed. Sibelius has done this correctly since they introduced" Open Key/Atonal" as a key signature option.

(B) Accidentals are extremely temperamental. The Respell Notes function works as if the notes were in concert pitch, even when working on the part, or on a transposed score. So even with "Favor Flats" on, you will still get F#'s on the Soprano Sax, because Finale thinks the note is "really" an E nat. The Cautionary Accidentals plugin gets similarly confused, and puts extraneous F naturals and C naturals all over the place because it thinks those notes are "really" Eb's and Bb's.

(C) This doesn't really apply to the piece Chuck is working on, but it's an enormous pain to set up a full score for Chromatic Transposition when using the Setup Wizard, which defaults to Key Signature transposition. Sibelius has a one-click solution (a key signature called "Open Key/Atonal") -- Finale makes you change each staff one by one.

(D) This also doesn't apply to Chuck's piece, but the default instrument Staff Styles are all configured to use Key Signature transposition. If you have an "Open Key" piece with woodwind doubles, you will also have to modify the staff styles. There's really no good reason why Staff Styles could not allow the possibility of respecting the *type* of transposition specified in the Staff Attributes, while changing only the *interval* of transposition.

Once you are aware of these issues, you can work around them, and using Chromatic Transposition is certainly far better than manually transposing the part. But sweet jeebus it would be nice if Finale addressed these longstanding and very frustrating problems.

Cheers,

- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY



On 02 Sep 2007, at 2:45 PM, Eric Dannewitz wrote:

Do you have the soprano part transposed in Finale? Is that why there is a key sig?

There are a couple of ways to maybe do this. One would be, when you are done, go back and in Staff Attributes, and unclick transpose then highlight the whole staff and then transpose it up a major second.

The other way would be to go to Staff attributes, and then unclick the show key signature for the soprano, then use the accidental plugin to have it display the sharps and flats. This way, the playback will still work ok.

Chuck Israels wrote:
Modern music folks:

I remember discussions of problems writing in "no key" - none of which I followed carefully (my bad). Now I find myself writing a piece for Saxophone, Trombone and Piano, in which "no key" is the correct key, and it doesn't make sense for the Soprano Sax part to show up in D major. The non-transposing instruments are no problem, but I'm not sure about the best way of dealing with the saxophone part, and I am looking for suggestions.

TIA,

Chuck

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