Tremolos

A tremolo marking, usually used to indicate either the rapid restriking of a note or a rapid alternation between notes, can be either measured (where each note is struck every eighth note or sixteenth note, for example) or unmeasured (where the notes are played as fast as possible, out of time).

There are several ways to create a tremolo marking in Finale, depending on the effect you want to create. See also Easy Tremolos plug-in.

To place a tremolo marking , , or (Articulation)

You can place one of these markings on a note stem (for a string tremolo, for example) or above or below a note. You can also place one between two stems to indicate a rapid alternation between the two pitches.

For full instructions, see Articulations.

To create a measured or unmeasured tremolo marking

Another form of tremolo often connects two longer values—for example, whole notes, as shown here:

In this section, you’ll learn how to use the Easy Tremolo plug-in to easily create tremolo markings. It’s customary to notate the tremolo duration twice—once for each part of the tremolo. First, enter two notes/chords that combined equal the desired duration of the tremolo. For example, to create a whole note tremolo like the one pictured above, first enter two half notes. To create a half note tremolo like the one seen below, enter quarter notes.

Then continue with the following instructions.

1. Click the Selection Tool  .
2. Highlight the measure(s) containing the notes you want to include in the tremolo.
3. From the Menu, choose TGTools and then Easy Tremolos. The Easy Tremolos dialog box appears.
4. In the text box, enter the total number of beams desired. You can also choose to avoid accidentals on notes with stems and define the tremolo for playback. For a description of these settings, see Easy Tremolo plug-in.
5. Click Go. Tremolo markings appear on all notes in the selected region according to your settings.

To remove the tremolo marking, from the Edit Menu, choose Undo (or, press Command-Z). If the Undo command is not available (created in an earlier Finale session), or you have added additional entries that you do not want to undo, use the Selection Tool to clear the entries out of the measure and re-enter the notation.

Human Playback interprets and performs tremolos during playback automatically. See Human Playback. To hear manual changes to the MIDI playback definition of tremolos (such as those applied with the Easy Tremolo plug-in), you must first set Human Playback to None in the Playback Controls.