FINALE for Composers
An Illustrated Guide To Finale
(Covering through version 2004 for both PC & Mac)
230 pages with hundreds of images
ISBN: 0-9753953-0-0
After countless hours of using Finale, hundreds of phone calls from musicians asking for help in Finale, as well as numerous lectures in the classroom teaching Finale at Carnegie Mellon University, I finally took the advice of my many colleagues, clients, friends, and students and set out to write a book on Finale. But not just any book. A book that focuses on Finale as a tool for composers. In order to get the most out of this book, I would suggest that you have at least a basic knowledge of the workings of Finale. While I am trying to cover the more elusive features many users might not know about in Finale, I occasionally have omitted some of the more basic skills that you can easily pick up from the user guide or probably already know.
The majority of the students at Carnegie Mellon University who have taken my Finale class are composers. I have seen first hand that composers have different needs when using Finale than other users do. They want to quickly and easily work with contemporary notation using Finale. They want to know how to make their parts look professionally printed with the least amount of time and effort usually waiting to the last minute to print them. (Remember, they are students). They want their MIDI playback to be accurate and as real sounding as possible. But, the biggest difference by far is that they ask questions. A lot of questions. By far the most common question they ask is “Can Finale do this?” The answer 99.9% of the time is always yes, but knowing how to get Finale to do it is the real question. This book is my answer to that question. Hopefully, composers, copyists, arrangers and anyone else who would like to learn more of what makes Finale the best program for professional and contemporary music will find learning the more advanced areas of Finale quickly and completely.
I can still remember the day that changed my entire life. I am standing in the downtown branch of the Pittsburgh Computer Store (in Pittsburgh, of course), and I am purchasing version 1.0 of Finale back in 1988. I am a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University majoring in music composition. I had been using some other very primitive notation program at that time and was happy to find something better. I can’t remember the price I paid. It was either $595 or $494 or maybe even $295. But all I know was that it was on sale and it was “going fast” so I had to jump in my car, speed downtown and double park just to get it before it sold out. I still have the original box it came in with the manuals and video. When Finale debuted, people were more impressed with the box than with the program. The box and manuals, when compared to today’s standard, seem extravagant, and I believed they were rumored to cost over $100. The box, which is actually one and a half boxes that nest inside each other, is a hard shiny cardboard containing a very impressive canvas three ring binder. The binder in turn contained a video as well as three spiral bound manuals—a User’s Guide, Reference Manual, and Power User’s Guide. And, the whole package was only available on Mac. I am sure that it must be a collector’s item now, but I promised myself it will never find itself listed on Ebay as so many of my other “treasures” have.
In the beginning, Coda created Finale and it was good. Well okay, it was good but very few people realized the potential it had when it first came out. The interface was clunky with a different type of click needed to accomplish various tasks—command-click for this, shift-click for that, and option-click for who remembers what. And the learning curve was steeper than Mount Everest. That made it all the more appealing to me. I love a challenge and no program no matter how difficult was going to get the better of me. So after a few weeks of fooling around with the thing, reading all of the manuals, watching the video, and hours of trial and error, I became a Finale aficionado. From that point on, I did every upgrade they had. I even switched between Mac and PC a few times just for good measure and used it on everything from my old Mac SE/30 to my current 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.
I have used Finale to print everything from simple rhythmic patterns for Eurhythmics exercises to full-blown Symphonies and Operas that were performed by professional orchestras and everything in between. Finale has helped me when I quickly needed to arrange a hymn for my limited voice church choir and has brought me enough clients to start a side business as a music copyist. You may have laughed earlier when I said that Finale has changed my life, but I believe that Finale has made all of these things possible for me. I would be at a very different place in my life if it were not for Finale. Now I would like to share my success in using Finale with you in this book so you can see what it can do for you.
Download a sample of the book.