What Christopher suggests is (pretty much as always), the best way I have found to do things. It does require taking the time to create a suffix library, but once it's done - it's done. I use Bill Duncan's chord symbol and chord suffix fonts and find them attractive and flexible enough, and slash chords are handled pretty well. All my templates are pre-loaded with the necessary suffixes. I avoid the jazz font and any other computer font that pretends to look handwritten. The built in dichotomy of seeing something that pretends to have a personal touch reproduced identically with unerring computer precision is more than I can tolerate, and it always looks ugly to me.
I also agree with Christopher that this is a problem for a music program to handle because of inconsistencies in the way different folks choose to write chord symbol shorthand. Bill Evans had a personal way of doing it that I read with ease when working with him - a system that no one else I know uses. Dominant 7ths were written normally. Major 7ths had a horizontal slash through the 7, the way Europeans write a 7 in order to distinguish it from a 1, which they commonly write with such a long hook on top that it can be mistaken for a 7. Bill's method was perfectly efficient and made a symbol like Fm Maj7 far more compact and easily understood. Accommodating all the quirky ways that people write chord symbols is a lot to ask of a notation program. Chuck On May 17, 2014, at 5:15 AM, Christopher Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Part of the problem is that there ISN'T a standardised way of writing chord > symbols. For instance, CM7, depending on where you live, could mean major or > minor 7, while C+7 could mean dom7(#5) or major 7. While Finale DOES have a > couple of more-or-less consistent libraries included in some common systems, > there are many missing symbols and some common systems are entirely missing. > Band In A Box doesn't have to worry about fonts, kerning, or positioning, so > its job is a little easier, but that doesn't excuse Finale for not being able > to do this better. After the Shape Designer, chords are the worst aspect of > Finale right now. > > I would say that creating your own library and loading it into your default > document is the only way to go. Delete the ones that are there first, though. > > BTW, there are problems with certain libraries when loaded into documents > with different default music fonts. When you load the Arial library into a > Jazz document, all the parentheses change to Jazz, which have different > baselines than Arial so they are not only in the wrong font, they are also > the wrong vertical position. The same problem occurs when you load a JazzCord > library into a Maestro document, in reverse. You can edit them manually, but > this is a huge job I would rather not do every time I load a frickin' chord > library. I edited them once in my default document, and leave it alone now. > > Christopher > > > On Sat May 17, at SaturdayMay 17 7:12 AM, Craig Parmerlee wrote: > >> I use chord symbols on almost every project I do, and Finale drives me >> nuts every time. For me, the spacing is the least of my problems >> (although I agree spacing is not great). To me, it is a lot more >> basic. Every chord I want to enter, Finale doesn't seem to recognize, >> and it doesn't seem to follow any common nomenclature system consistently. >> >> I suppose after all these years, I should have dug into it and crated my >> own library, but I haven't. How is it that if you use a program like >> Band-in-a-box, it knows what I mean in about 95% of the cases, but >> Finale doesn't seem to recognize the most basic suffixes? >> >> Is this solvable by developing a better library or are the problems >> endemic in the software instead? If it is a library issue, maybe a >> group can collaborate to develop a library that actually works. >> >> >> On 5/15/2014 5:26 PM, Christopher Smith wrote: >>> Once you get a nice library set up (with that tiny little un-resizeable >>> edit window where the nudge buttons don't work!) it is pretty painless. I >>> have many, many issues with the chord tool, though. >>> >>> Christopher >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Finale mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale >> >> To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: >> [email protected] >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale > > To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: > [email protected] > Chuck Israels 8831 SE 12th Ave. Portland, OR 97202-7097 land line: (503) 954-2107 cell phone: (360) 201-3434 <www.chuckisraelsjazz.com> _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: [email protected]
