I just this afternoon answered this question on another list > > A student has a question about how to notate different time > > signatures in different scores within the same measure on a > > staff, such as in Stravinksy's Petrouchka with 7/8 against 3/4 > > notated in different instruments in the same measure. The > > student is doing an orchestration and needs to be able to notate > > this. > > A good forum for this kind of question is: > > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > > But have the student look in the manual under STAVES -- MULTIPLE TIME > SIGNATURES. They should be advised, though, that there are some bugs > in using independent time signatures (such as spacing anomolies), but > I've used them quite successfully without encountering those bugs > myself.
I originally had written to look up "INDEPENDENT TIME SIGNATURES" in the manual, but realized that, knowing Finale's manuals, I should probably check to see if this was helpful or not. I was rather shocked at how obtuse the manual is -- if you look for INDEPENDENT TIME SIGNATURES (in the 2003 manual), there is no entry in the index, even the user interface has TIME SIGNATURE under INDEPENDENT ELEMENTS in the Staff Attributes dialog. Every discussion of the topic that's ever come up on this list that I can recall used "Independent Time Signatures" to refer to this feature, so there really is no reason for the manual to cite it with any other term. Secondly, the only way I actually found it was by going to the topic for STAVES (because I already knew how to do it), and finding MULTIPLE TIME SIGNATURES (and it's not so obvious to me that this is the right choice). There *is* a listing in the manual under M for MULTIPLE TIME SIGNATURES, but it doesn't actually link directly in my copy of the manual to the topic, but to the general topic of time signatures. This is typical of Finale's documentation -- a completely lack of coordination between the terminology and indexing in the manual the actual way things are referred to in the UI of the program itself. I'm just wondering if this has been fixed in later versions of the manual. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
