It may be that you’re more interested in using Finale as a notation-based pseudo-sequencer than as a notation program. If so, this tutorial will introduce you to some of Finale’s special playback and MIDI capabilities. If you don’t plan to play back with Finale, skip ahead to Tutorial 7.
One of Finale’s strengths is its versatile playback and MIDI editing capabilities. You have extensive of control over broad-scale playback effects, and of course, the most minute details. For example, you can choose to playback using professional GPO instrument sounds, indicate your piece is to be performed in a Reggae style with Human Playback, and then adjust the volume and panning in real time with Finale’s mixer controls. Then, if a section doesn’t sound exactly as you like, use the MIDI Tool to rework the most subtle detail.
This chapter will first guide you through the easy ways to get your music sounding great, and then delve into some advanced MIDI editing topics for the perfectionists.
Assigning MIDI Channels and Instruments
Usually, the first step to preparing a score for playback is assigning instruments to staves. If you began your score (or added staves) with the Setup Wizard, instruments have been assigned for you automatically. Even so, you may need to edit the channel, patch, or bank depending on your MIDI output device. For example, setting each staff to its own channel allows you to make changes to each staff individually in real-time using the Mixer or Staff Controls. You can modify the instrument sound, volume, panning, and channel for every staff individually. Furthermore, you can adjust all of these settings for separate layers (voices) within a single staff.
In this section, you’ll learn how to manipulate the channel and instrument for staves using the Instrument List.
An Instrument contains the information needed to access a specific MIDI sound. This includes a name for identification of the Instrument, a channel number to send the information on, and Patch information, consisting of Program change and optional bank change data. An Instrument can be assigned to several staves—if you write a piano part, for example, you’ll certainly want both staves to play over the same MIDI channel and the same piano sound, so you’d designate the two staves using the same Instrument. An Instrument can also be used for just one layer of a staff. If you wrote a flute and a clarinet part both on a single staff, but in different layers, each one could have its own Instrument, and thus have its own MIDI channel and patch assignment.
As you can see from the previous diagram, the Instrument List gives you a convenient way to control which staves play back. Click in the Mute column (M) to mute a staff—or click in the Solo column (S) to isolate a staff (and silence the others).
From the Instrument drop-down list across from the Strings staff, choose New Instrument. Name the Instrument “Strings,” and assign it to Channel 3. From the General MIDI Menu, choose “49: String Ensemble 1.” Click OK.
Notice that the Piano and Piano (LH) staves are already assigned to an instrument called “Grand Piano” on channel 1. You can leave these two staves alone. You don't have to create new Instrument names. If you find it easier, you can just edit one of the existing names provided by Finale.
Now suppose you decide to play the piano part on a different channel—channel 11, for example. Edit the “Chan.” column for one Piano staff. Since both Piano staves are assigned to the Piano Instrument, Finale changes the channel assignment of both staves to channel 11 automatically. When you do this, the general MIDI instrument will also change for both staves (since there is another instrument definition using channel 11, in this case, Bassoon). Click the drop-down (Macintosh: pop-up) menu under the GM column and choose the Piano sound for one of the piano staves. They will both change to the piano sound. Before moving on, change the Piano staves back to channel 1.
Using Aria Player with Garritan Personal Orchestra
Up to this point you’ve probably been listening to Finale’s performances using the standard General MIDI sounds. Although the SmartMusic SoftSynth is a first-rate GM SoundFont, Finale also offers professionally sampled sounds from Garritan Personal Orchestra’s renowned collection of world-class instrument libraries. These are real instrument recordings that have been professionally mastered, offering the most realistic sounding playback imaginable. An assortment of GPO instruments is included with your Finale package, and can be selected while starting a new score with the Setup Wizard, or assigned to existing instrument staves.
You can use a MIDI hardware device or a VST player (such as the Aria Player for Finale) for playback, but only one of these methods for any given document. The SmartMusic SoftSynth sounds are available as a VST library and SoundFont, so they can be assigned through MIDI (MIDI Setup) or the
Note the recommended system requirements for GPO are higher than Finale’s recommended system requirements. The steps in this section require at least 512 MB of RAM. Close all applications other than Finale.
To specify you want to use GPO instruments while beginning a new score, do the following. (Do not close Tutorial 6, we’ll continue where we left off soon).
Of course, you can also assign GPO instruments to existing staves. When doing so, you also need to assign the stave’s corresponding channel in the Aria Player. Here’s how:
Windows users press 
-Tab,
and Mac users, 
-‘ to switch between active documents.
If you upgraded from Finale 2006, you will also see an option for “Finale GPO” which continues to be available for Files created in Finale 2006 that were configured to use the original Finale GPO. “Finale GPO” supports 8 channels per player for a total of 64 possible.
Steinway Piano now appears in the slot for channel 1. Remember the Piano staff is already set to channel 1 in the Instrument List. You might want to open the Instrument List and move it to the top of the screen as a reference while assigning channels with the Aria Player.
Remember that each incarnation of the Aria Player only accommodates 16 instruments. Therefore, if you would like to use separate GPO instruments for 17 or more staves, you will need to add another device in the
As you listen to your document, you may discover a need to adjust the balance of individual staves. For example, you may want to increase the volume of the flute section, or move the trumpet section to the right side of the stage using panning controls. You can use Finale’s Mixer controls to make these adjustments. The Mixer allows you to make real-time playback adjustments to the full score, or each staff individually. The mixer settings you apply are post-processed on top of existing playback data, so all existing MIDI data, including HP, is left as-is (as if you were sending the music from your computer through a conventional mixer). Mixer settings appear in the Mixer window and Staff Controls. There is even a view, Studio View, designed specifically for auditioning your score. To view these controls, do the following.
Volume, panning, and instrument controls in the Mixer and Studio View Staff Controls are linked. A change to a setting in one of these two places applies to both.
The Master controls apply to the full score and include a volume slider, reverb dial and room size dial. Staff Controls include a volume slider, pan dial, and instrument selector, as well as Solo, Mute, and Record buttons. All Staff Control settings are redundant to the staff controls in the Mixer. All Mixer/Staff Control settings are saved with the document, so your music will sound the same the next time you open it.
Now, let’s take a quick tour of the Mixer controls and explore some real-time playback effects:
Volume, panning, and instrument controls in the Mixer and Studio View Staff Controls are linked. A change to a setting in one of these two places applies to both.
Finale includes a powerful capability to interpret articulations, expressions, hairpins, and other markings, and generate playback that simulates a live human performance. This feature, called “Human Playback,” can be set to emulate a specific musical style, such as classical, baroque, or jazz, and can even recognize and interpret expression text that appears in the score, such as “rit.” or “cresc.”, and adjust the tempo or dynamic level accordingly. Human Playback will even include Smart Shapes in its interpretation including crescendos/diminuendos (hairpins), glissandos, and trills. If your goal is to create a MIDI performance that sounds closer to a human performance, try these options first.
Caution: If you are using the Human Playback feature, MIDI data assigned to the document manually with the MIDI Tool or Expression Tool will not apply to the MIDI performance. To turn off Human Playback, in the Playback Settings, under Human Playback Style, choose None. (You can still apply Human Playback to regions of your score with the Apply Human Playback plug-in).
When you start a new Finale document, Human Playback is on by default and set to the “Standard” playback style. Simply add some of the markings just mentioned and playback the score to hear Human Playback at work. To customize Human Playback’s interpretation, do the following:
Click Human Playback Preferences to customize Human Playback’s interpretation.
You can also apply Human Playback to a region of your score using the Apply Human Playback plug-in. To do this, first, set Human Playback to None in the Playback Settings (Mac: Playback Controls), then highlight a region of your score with the Selection Tool and from the Plug-ins Menu, choose Playback > Apply Human Playback. See Playback in the User Manual for more details.
If you want more control over every detail of Finale’s MIDI performance, you can use the MIDI Tool. If you use the MIDI Tool, set Human Playback to None in the Playback Settings dialog box (Mac: Playback Controls). Note that if you use the MIDI Tool to customize MIDI data for parts of your score, you can still apply Human Playback to other regions of your score using the Apply Human Playback plug-in.
Recording a tempo with Finale using a MIDI device or even your computer keyboard is as easy as waving a baton. You can record, or “conduct,” a tempo as you listen to the score to define precise tempo adjustments using TempoTap.
Let’s use the Tutorial 6 file to demonstrate TempoTap.
.To prepare for recording a tempo, consider counting off a measure or two, stopping short of pressing the spacebar, before recording the first beat.
You can record with additional precision by editing the note durations in the TempoTap staff. By default, the staff is filled with notes equalling the value of the main beat. If you want to specify a rallentando passage, for example, which slows drastically in a short amount of time, you may want to tap eighth notes instead of quarter notes to indicate the gradual change in tempo for the duration of the passage. To do so, use the Simple or Speedy Entry Tool to enter eighth notes for that region in TempoTap staff.
If you want precise control over every aspect of the MIDI data, you can use the MIDI Tool instead of applying Human Playback. The MIDI Tool lets you edit the raw MIDI data of your score, from a single note to an entire staff. You can visually edit pitch bends, velocity, patch changes, and other parameters. If Human Playback provides all the control you desire over your performance, you can skip the rest of this chapter.
Captured MIDI information isn’t really part of the notation itself. Instead, it consists of variables that a musician creates in a performance of the music—specifically, when recording with HyperScribe. Stress and accents, rushing the beat—all of these human elements constitute captured MIDI data. When you use Human Playback, this data is added for you temporarily every time you play back the score. The MIDI Tool allows you to adjust this data for your score manually.
In Tutorial 1c you experimented with the scrolling playback option; at the end of the tutorial, you listened to the original performance of a piece while looking at the notated version. Finale always lets you choose which way you’d like to hear your music: as strict, perfectly even sheet music, or as the original, unquantized MIDI performance, with a human feel and all captured MIDI data intact.
As an experiment, try listening to the same piece twice—once with, and once without the captured MIDI data.
For comparison, listen to it now as it was originally performed. To tell Finale to use the captured MIDI data, you have to change some settings in the Playback/Record Options dialog box. To prepare for the MIDI Tool lesson, do the following:
Now that you have some understanding of captured MIDI data, let’s try manipulating this data.
. A new menu appears, called MIDI Tool.
Selecting music with the MIDI Tool is exactly
like selecting music with the Selection Tool. Select a single measure
by clicking it once; several onscreen measures by drag-enclosing any part
of them; a long region by clicking the first measure, scrolling to the
last measure, and 
-clicking the last measure; and an entire
staff by clicking to the left of the staff. You can also select the entire
piece by choosing Select All from the Edit Menu.
If you take a look at the commands in the MIDI Tool Menu, you’ll notice that there appear to be three different elements you can edit: Key Velocities (how hard the keys were struck, which usually determines their volume); Note Durations (how long they were held down); and Continuous Data (pedaling, pitch bend, patch changes, and the like). Be sure that Edit Key Velocities is selected.
To show you the power of the MIDI Tool, you’ll create a decrescendo over the first two measures, even though there’s now a crescendo when they play back.
NOTE: Some MIDI keyboards don’t respond to key velocity information at all. If the volume or timbre of the notes on your keyboard doesn’t vary with the force you use to strike them, the keyboard is not “touch-sensitive.” Unless you want to take this opportunity to connect a velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard, skip ahead to Editing Note Durations (Start and Stop Times).
Being able to scale performance data in this way may be useful, but it’s not very interactive—you can only tell what changes you’ve made by listening to the music. Fortunately, you can also see the changes you’ve made.
At the bottom of the window, you’ll see the notes in the measures you double-clicked. Above them is a graph. Each bar of the graph corresponds to the key velocity (volume) of the note directly below it. Along the left side of the window you can see a legend of velocity values, scaled from 0 to 127.
You can immediately see the effects of your Scale command—the bars representing the key velocities grow steadily shorter over the first two measures. As an experiment, let’s now make the second half of the phrase crescendo. You may need to move the display so that you can see measures 3 and 4; if so, click the arrow buttons (on Windows, use the scroll bar at the bottom of your screen).
Any region you select in the graph area automatically selects the handles of the corresponding notes below it.
The remaining experiments in this tutorial delve deeply into some of Finale’s powerful MIDI capabilities. If you don’t thrive on technical discussions, feel free to skip ahead to Expressions: Defining Playback later in this chapter.
|
The MIDI Tool Menu Play command does not support Internal Speaker Playback on the Mac. Use the Playback Controls. |
Here’s a quick rundown of the remaining MIDI Tool Menu commands. These descriptions assume you’ve first selected the music to be edited. Remember that when you’re not in the MIDI Tool split-window, you select measures exactly as you would with the Selection Tool—by clicking a single measure, drag-enclosing several, and so on. Within the MIDI Tool split-window, you can edit a single staff, and you select notes either by dragging through the graph region or by selecting individual note handles in one of the ways shown here:
To select individual notes in the MIDI Tool split-window, you can drag-enclose them or Shift-click individual handles, or Shift–drag-enclose additional groups of notes.
Once you’ve selected the music, you can choose any of the MIDI Tool Menu’s transformation commands from below the line.
Set To gives every note in the selected region exactly the same velocity (volume). You type a number between 0 and 127.
Scale produces a smooth, gradual change from one velocity value to another across the selected region. If you select “Absolute,” you can enter values in the text boxes between 0 and 127. If you select “Percent of Original,” Finale scales the selected notes’ velocities proportional to their current values, thus preserving some of the original variations from note to note; in this case, you can enter virtually any positive numbers in the text boxes. For example, if you entered 100 and 200 in the boxes, respectively, the first notes would play back with their original velocities, and the last notes would play back with twice their original velocities.
Add simply gives the selected notes greater velocity than they already have. If you enter a negative number, you subtract velocity. Type a number between –127 and 127, keeping in mind that the sum of this number and a note’s current velocity has to be between 0 and 127.
Percent Alter increases or decreases the selected music’s velocity by a percentage of its current value. To make a passage twice as loud as it is now, choose Percent Alter and type 200 (percent).
Limit lets you set maximum and minimum key velocity levels for the selected music. You type in numbers between 0 and 127. If you enter a maximum velocity of 90, for example, any existing velocity values between 91 and 127 will be clipped down to 90.
Alter Feel lets you accent specific beats in the measure, by either a specified amount (Absolute) or by a percentage of their current velocities (Percent of Original). If you enter negative numbers (when Absolute is selected), you’ll be giving the specified music less velocity, and hence less emphasis. In the Alter Feel dialog box that appears, you’ll see that you can provide either an absolute or a percentage change independently for notes that fall on Downbeats, Other Beats, or Backbeats. (For definitions, see Backbeats in the User Manual.)
As an example, suppose you have a rockabilly tune and you want to boost the backbeats to give your playback more drive. In this case, you’d select the entire score (with the MIDI Tool), choose Key Velocities and Alter Feel from the MIDI Tool Menu, select Percent of Original, and type 150 into the Backbeats text box. The result would be 50% more volume on the backbeats.
Randomize alters the selected music’s velocity by a random amount. This can be a useful option if you want to give your playback a more imperfect, “human” feeling. Type a fairly small number into the text box—between 10 and 20, for example (unless you really want some unpredictable, madcap accents).
NOTE: Finale stores the velocity value for each note as the difference in velocity from the default velocity value (the “Base Key Velocity”). You set the Base Key Velocity in the Playback Controls. Suppose, for example, that this value is 60. If a note displayed in the MIDI Tool window has a velocity of 90, Finale simply remembers that its velocity is 30 more than the Base Key Velocity value. Why does Finale store velocity values this way? Because with this system, you can quickly and easily adjust the overall velocity (volume) level of your piece by changing the Base Key Velocity value. The dynamic nuances of your piece will be preserved—but the overall volume level will increase or decrease accordingly.
Editing Note Durations (Start and Stop Times)
For the next experiment, restore all the velocity information to a uniform level. If the graph area above measures 3 and 4 isn’t already highlighted, drag through it now.
(Mac:
) key. The () key removes all MIDI data alterations in the selected region—even
if you’re not in the MIDI Tool split-window. It doesn’t erase all
MIDI data, however—only the kind that’s currently selected in the MIDI
Tool Menu (Key Velocities, Note Durations, and so on).If necessary, use the left horizontal scroll bar arrow to move back so that you can see measures 1 and 2. Restore these notes’ velocities to 64 as well.
Now you’ll try using the MIDI Tool to edit the playback durations of the notes in your score.
You’ll notice that the graph in the MIDI Tool split-window has changed. Now you’re seeing each note represented by a thin horizontal line; the longer the line, the longer the note’s duration. You’ll also see several thin gray vertical gridlines; these gridlines represent the strict quantized “locations” of the notated notes:
The menu commands you explored while editing Key Velocities also work on Note Durations. In some of the dialog boxes for these commands, however, you’ll encounter the words Start Time and Stop Time.
These terms seem clear enough; Start Time refers to the attack of a note, and Stop Time refers to the release. What makes their usage trickier is that they don’t refer to the notated durations of the notes. Instead, they relate those notated values to the captured MIDI information generated by your original performance, before your performance was quantized and transcribed into notation.
In fact, Start Time measures the difference between the notated (quantized) value’s starting point and the moment you actually struck the note in your performance. In the figure on the right, the Start Time is a positive number for the first note (because it was played slightly after the beat), and the Stop Time is a negative number (because the note was released slightly before the next beat).
The Start Time is the difference between the actual (performed) attack point and the notated (quantized) attack point. The Stop Time is the difference between the performed and quantized release points. These differences can be either positive or negative; Stop Time (a), above, is a negative number, but Stop Time (b) is positive.
In fact, had you played precisely on the beat, with accuracy to 1024ths of a quarter note, the Start and Stop Times would both be zero. There would be no difference between the quantized and the actual attack point of the note.
The Start and Stop Times are measured in Finale’s own very small durational units, called EDUs (ENIGMA Durational Units)—1024ths of a quarter note. The following table has some common EDU equivalents (a full table appears under Equivalents in the Appendix of the User Manual.)
Keeping this chart handy, take a look at some of the MIDI Tool’s Note Duration menu commands:
Set to gives every note in the selected region exactly the same Start and Stop Times, measured in EDUs. If, for example, you want every note in a certain region to sound a fraction of a beat early, you might set the Start Times of the notes in the region to –300. Set the Start and Stop Times to zero if you want to “quantize” every note squarely to its strict notated duration.
Scale produces a gradual change from one Start or Stop Time value to another across the selected region. You can enter EDU values in the text boxes, thus specifying that the attacks or releases of the notes move steadily closer to (or further from) the beats.
Add increases or decreases the Start or Stop Time of every note in the selected region by an equivalent amount. Note that this command preserves the relative existing differences in Start and Stop Times. Enter a positive EDU value to increase the Start Time (a later attack) or Stop Time (a later release) of all selected notes, and a negative number to decrease these times.
Percent Alter is a unique command in Note Durations mode, because it’s the only command that directly affects the total durations of the selected notes, instead of their Start and Stop Times. This command lets you increase or decrease the selected notes’ playback durations by a percentage of their current values. This command doesn’t, of course, affect the notated values of the notes—it just affects the way they play back. To create a staccato passage in which every note plays back with only half its notated value, you could choose Percent Alter and type 50 (percent).
Limit lets you set a minimum and maximum Start and Stop Time value for the selected notes; in other words, it can serve to “pull” the attack and release of each note closer to its notated value. You can think of Limit as a pseudo-quantizer, because it decreases the difference between the notated durations and your humanly imperfect performance.
Alter Feel changes the Start and Stop Times of Downbeats, Other Beats, and Backbeats as defined in the section Editing Key Velocities (earlier). A positive Start Time value pushes the playback attack of a note later, relative to its notated value.
Randomize alters the selected notes’ Start and Stop Times by a random amount, giving the music a less quantized, more human feeling. You might type an EDU value of A (or less) of the predominant rhythmic values in the music; for example, to subtly soften the rhythmic precision of a passage of eighth notes (512 EDUs each), you might type 32 into the Start and Stop Times boxes.
More Uses for Key Velocity and Note Duration Commands
You might also find the MIDI Tool useful for correcting characteristics in some of your MIDI keyboard’s sounds. For example, suppose you have a string patch with a very slow attack; upon playback, it sounds as though each note is entering late. You could solve the problem with the MIDI Tool: Select the entire staff. Then, making sure that Note Durations is selected in the MIDI Tool Menu, choose Add To. In this instance, you’d add a negative number to both Start and Stop Times, thus forcing the strings to enter (and release) slightly early on playback. If you’ve entered an appropriate EDU value (which you can calculate for yourself, remembering that –512 would be a full eighth note early), the strings will seem to play right in time with the other instruments.
You can use the same technique to shift all notes slightly later in playback time. If you alter one of two duplicate staves this way, you can create some interesting echo effects—a note on the unaffected staff sounds first, followed a fraction of a second later by the same note on the shifted staff.
You might also consider using the MIDI
Tool to accent the melody in a series of chords—to bring out an inner
voice. Once you’ve selected the region to be affected, double-click the
highlighted area to enter the MIDI Tool split-window. By clicking and
-clicking (or by drag-enclosing and -drag-enclosing),
you can highlight only the handles of the individual notes you want to
change, even if they’re buried in chords. In the “Silent Night” example
below, only the handles of the melody—the middle voice—were highlighted.
Once the correct notes are selected, choose Percent Alter from the MIDI Tool Menu. Set all Key Velocity values to 150% (for example) of their current values; instantly you’ve brought out the melody from the close voicings. (In the example above, you can see the effect on the velocity graphs for the selected melody notes; they are indeed 50% greater than the harmony notes.)
Continuous data is displayed in a slightly different format when you look at it in the MIDI Tool split-window. Instead of thin vertical or horizontal lines, you see a graph of solid black. In this example, you can experiment with adding pedaling to a passage. We’ll assume that you’re viewing the first two measures of the “Tutorial 6a” document in the MIDI Tool split-window.
The sustain pedal’s value can’t change smoothly over time (like pitch wheel data can). You’ve either pressed the pedal (value 127) or released it (value 0). At the moment, the window is empty, because the pedal has not yet been used; its value throughout the piece is zero.
Pedaling will appear in this window in bar graph form. In the example at right, the pedal was depressed just after the second beat, and released after the fourth beat.
Note, too, that the notes in the display no longer have handles. That’s because controller information is independent of the actual notes being played—you can press the pedal even during a measure of rests, if you want. Therefore, you specify where you want to insert a “pedal down” message (or another on/off controller, or a patch change) by dragging through a sliver of the graph area.
When you return to the window, click anywhere in the MIDI Tool window except the graph area to remove the selection highlighting. You’ll see that the bar representing the pedal is now quite short:
from the Main Tool Palette.
(Mac: click the Close button.) Clicking on the MIDI Tool (or any
other tool in the Main Tool Palette) closes the MIDI Tool split-window.
(Mac: you must click on the Close button to close the MIDI window.)Once you’ve created one complete usage of the pedal, as you’ve just done, you don’t have to create it again in other measures that should contain a similar pedaling pattern. You can simply copy the pedaling from measure 1 into other measures. You’ll find out about copying MIDI Tool data in the next section.
Removing and Copying MIDI Tool Data
To delete any modifications you’ve made
with the MIDI Tool, select the desired measures in the score, and then
press (Mac:
) This procedure deletes only the currently selected data
type. In other words, if you’ve changed both Key Velocities and Note Durations,
you can delete only one at a time—depending on which one is currently
selected (with a check mark) in the MIDI Tool Menu. Similarly, if you’ve
edited several different controllers, pressing the () key removes only the data of the currently selected controller
type.
You can also copy MIDI Tool changes to other staves or parts of the score, much as you would copy music with the Selection Tool. Select the source measures with the MIDI Tool, and drag the first selected measure’s “image” so that it’s superimposed on the first of the target measures. The changes you’ve made to the captured MIDI information are copied to the target music. Once again, however, this procedure copies only the currently selected data type.
A final note about MIDI Tool changes: They can greatly increase the size, in kilobytes, of your document. Because Finale is recording velocity, duration, and other data about every single note in the area you’ve changed, it’s possible to double the size of your document if you make MIDI Tool modifications over large areas.
Expressions: Defining Playback
One of the most remarkable aspects of Finale
is its ability to respond to musical markings in the score during playback.
When Finale sees 
, the music gets loud. When it sees a
staccato mark, it plays the note shorter. What’s more, you can create
any symbol or textual phrase—whether or not it’s a standard musical marking—and
define the effects it will have on Finale’s playback.
As a first experiment, you’ll now perform some further transformations to the document you’ve been working on. If you don’t already have the document “Tutorial 6a” on the screen, open it now.
. Scroll to measure 5, if needed.
mark. You’ve placed the piano mark in your score. To adjust its position, drag its handle.
mark. Adjust
the position of the new expression. Now listen to the new dynamics.mark’s handle and click Edit. The Expression Designer
dialog box appears.
Look at the playback definition of the ¼ marking. Key Velocity is selected in the Type drop-down list, and the number 36 appears in the Set to Value text box. In other words, the creator of this marking decided that the ¼ marking should give the notes it affects a Key Velocity of 36. (The scale of MIDI velocity goes from 0 [silence] to 127 [very loud].) When Finale reaches the ¼ marking, it will play all notes (assigned to that instrument’s MIDI channel) at velocity (volume) 36—at least until it encounters a new dynamic marking. Some of the other MIDI variables you can attach to a score marking are also extremely useful. For example, by selecting Patch from the Type drop-down list, you could make the phrase “To Clarinet” switch the playback of its staff to a clarinet sound from an existing sax sound; just type the number of your MIDI keyboard’s clarinet patch into the Program Change text box when you create the expression.
By selecting Patch and entering a patch number (in the “Program Change” text box), you can create a playback definition for the Text Expression “To Clarinet.”
Similarly, if you’re creating an 
marking, you could define it to transpose the affected music
up an octave. In this dialog box, you’d choose Transposition from the
Type drop-down list and type 12 in the Set to Value text box (up 12 half
steps). Notice that the written notes don’t get transposed—only their
playback. Note, too, that Finale will continue to play the music up an
octave until it encounters another expression, such as
loco, that you’ve defined to return the playback to its normal
register (by choosing Transposition and entering zero in the Set to Value
text box).
You can also quickly create tempo markings and assign the playback tempo using the Create Tempo Marking plug-in
Creating an Intelligent Tempo Marking
, and double-click just above the beginning of measure
4. The Expression Selection dialog box appears. If you scroll through
the list you’ll see that Presto, the expression you want to create, doesn’t
appear in the list.
Making your score play back with eighth notes in swing style is quick work with the Playback Controls, but what if you want more control over when and how to swing?
In a pure triplet swing feel, the second eighth note of every pair (the backbeat) is played as though it’s the last note of a triplet, as shown here.
In other words, it’s delayed (and the first eighth note is held longer). Delaying or rushing the playback of notes with respect to their written rhythms is precisely the function of the Swing command in the Expression Tool.
If Jazz or Blues Human Playback is applied, swing settings are set automatically. Swing settings are grayed out if the Human Playback style does not incorporate swing, as is the case with the Classical or Romantic styles.
You can use the Swing command to delay the attack of every eighth note backbeat. All you need to do is decide how much to delay them.
If you type 100 into the Set to Swing text box, you will hear true triplet swing in your playback. Needless to say, you can change this number, depending on the amount of swing you want; at a fast tempo, you’d probably want to decrease this number (so the notes sound more like even eighths). At a slow tempo, you might want to increase the number for an even more pronounced swing effect.
, and double-click the beginning of measure 4. The Expression Selection dialog box appears.
Finale allows you to write to picture using either the integrated Movie Window, or a SMPTE-compatible movie player or editor. If you would like to sync Finale to another software product, it must be capable of receiving MIDI Time Code, which is the SMPTE medium that can be sent from Finale for synchronization. If you decide to use Finale’s integrated Movie Window, videos need to be in QuickTime (Mac and Windows) or Windows Media format (Windows). To play QuickTime movies in Finale for Windows, QuickTime (a free download at www.apple.com) must be installed. (The accompanying file “Tutorial 6b.mov” is in QuickTime format.)
Finale offers performance tools designed specifically for writing to video. For example, the tempo of your Finale score, or portions of your score, can be modified to fit within a specific duration, so the music flows with the movie perfectly. Also, to help guide you, measure number “time” indicators can be used to show the elapsed time at any measure. In this section, you will learn how to synchronize Finale with video and use the tools necessary to successfully compose an accompanying sound track.
To prepare for this tutorial, do the following:
Notice the Time is displayed on the Movie Window and Finale’s Playback Controls. As long as the “Sync” box is checked, both the movie and music start, stop, rewind, and fast-forward together. Let’s try it now.
Let’s say we want to edit the music so that the piano and the carnival enter simultaneously—a common type of edit when writing alongside video. To do this, we will adjust the tempo slightly from the beginning of the score until measure 14.
When You’re Ready to Continue
You can save expressions in a library of its own, if you want; click on the File Menu, choose Save Library. Click Text Expressions, click OK, give the library a name, and click Save. If you want to add this expression to the library you already created, follow the procedures outlined at the end of Tutorial 3.
Close your document, saving it if you want.
