For years I've been using Fin2004a (Win) on a daily basis, and have developed a comfortable and efficient set of procedures for working on (mostly) large orchestral scores. Circumstances have led me to upgrade to Fin2012a (+ GPO 4) on a Win7 machine, and after spending considerable time going through the documentation and testing most of the new features, I'm still wondering about a few details in my attempt to establish a new and efficient working method. I'm hoping to glean a few nuggets from some of the experienced voices on this list.
First, I must say that I'm impressed at the number of improvements and refinements in Finale over the past 8 years. No more need for 2 of every articulation, one for note side and one for stem side (and the tedious editing of same when extracting parts). An entire level of complexity (staff optimization) has been removed from score layout. Self-adjusting rehearsal letters. Human Playback seems to work pretty well for the most part, esp. with Garritan instruments. The "virtualization" of instruments via ScoreManager looks to be a big plus. Which brings me to linked parts. With the improvements made over the last few years, the current implementation seems robust and well designed, but still not flexible enough for my needs. The first problem is how to handle multi-part staves (typical for winds in an orchestral score). The "Edit Voicing" option in Manage Parts doesn't work for any but the most simple parts. Adding cues that appear in the part and not the score would need a massive kludge and is impractical. I also like a different scaling factor for music spacing in parts than for the score, which looks impossible. My thought for producing parts was to adapt my previous procedure: make a copy of the final score just for parts, use TGTools for smart explosion of multi-part staves, and then use linked parts instead of extracting them. Howerver, I've found that TGTools "Smart Explosion" often gets hung up when running on Fin2012a (it also occasionally hangs on Fin2004a in Win7, so it may have something to do with the 64-bit OS). I suppose I could manually create new staves, copy the multi-part staff to each, run TGTools "Process Extracted Parts" on each new staff (the version that comes with Fin2012, not the older full TGTools, which also hangs up), then manually clean up the resulting parts (Smart Explosion has more smarts than Process Extracted Parts). Since text blocks can't be placed on different pages in score and (linked) parts, I suppose movement titles would have to be expressions, which can't be automatically centered. There must be other issues I'm not anticipating, and I guess it's possible I might end up extracting parts the old-fashioned way. I'd love to hear other opinions about "best practice" methods of handling parts in large ensemble scores. I've always used external MIDI devices for playback, and gotten quite expert at both using the Finale MIDI tool, and finding workarounds for its limitations, but I'm going to go 21st century and use software samples (GPO) and Human Playback, which I always had turned off previously. I sure would like to know a little more about the details of HP; e.g., exactly how short does a note have to be to trigger staccato samples for strings? And I may be missing something, but I don't see a way to add terms to the HP Dictionary (e.g., "norm." instead of "normale"), though there is a kludge using hidden expressions. Based on some experimentation, my current thinking is that in order to get finer control over playback, HP needs some help by incorporating manually added MIDI data. If reasonably realistic playback is important to you, I'd like to hear what your approach is using GPO and HP. Finally, I know that engraver triplets have been around for a while, but I'm having a hard time discerning what advantages they offer. Actually, I'm really not sure what they are. And does anyone have an alternative to TGTools Modify->Shift->Accidentals, which crashes on my system? The default accidental placement in chords is quite unattractive to my eye, and I dread the thought of having to manually shift all of them. Thanks in advance for anyone spending the time to offer advice and/or info. -Lee Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic http://www.leeactor.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
