MAKEMUSIC Finale 2007 (Mac/Win)

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Peter Hamlin

Music-notation software Finale has been around since 1988, an eternity in personal-computing years. Over time, this sophisticated and feature-packed program has become an invaluable tool for musicians who work with music notation. It's impossible to give a comprehensive assessment of such an extensive program, but I can offer a general idea of how Finale works, describe some of its distinctive features, and discuss some significant upgrades from previous versions (you can read reviews of Finale 2003 and 2004 online at www.emusician.com).

Where to Begin?

Finale is a huge program, but it isn't difficult to learn if you approach it one step at a time, learning what you need to know when you need it. A series of excellent tutorials takes you through the program piece by piece.

You get started with Finale by running the Setup wizard to establish the staves, transpositions, key and time signatures, and other basics. When you're ready to enter music, you can choose one of several note-entry tools for that purpose.

Another method is Step-Time Entry, which lets you play notes or chords on your MIDI keyboard while selecting the rhythmic values on your numeric keypad (pressing 7 for a whole note, 6 for a half note, 5 for a quarter note, and so on). You can choose from two fast and powerful tools for Step-Time Entry: Simple Entry and Speedy Entry. Their functionality overlaps, but they are different enough that you may prefer one over the other.

You can play music in real time using the HyperScribe tool, a technique that offers several quantization options so that Finale accurately transcribes your playing. Another alternative is MicNotator, which allows brass and woodwind players to transcribe monophonic performances using a microphone along with Simple Entry, Speedy Entry, or HyperScribe. You can also import a MIDI file, a scanned printed score, or one of several notation file formats.

All the Right Tools

Finale is organized into 30 tools, each with a particular function (see Fig. 1). In addition to the note-entry tools, the program has tools to enter or edit time signatures and key signatures, add articulations, insert dynamic markings and other expressions, format the score, and even microedit a passage to create nontraditional notation (see Fig. 2).

Space limitations for this review prevent me from discussing all of Finale's tools and their functions, but suffice it to say that you'll use some tools frequently and others (such as the one for creating ossia passages) less often. Finale gives you tools for creating chord symbols and fretboard charts, early-music notation, lyrics — the list encompasses just about any music-notation symbol or situation you can imagine (see Web Clip 1). The beauty of Finale's organization is that you can concentrate on the tools you need and ignore the others. You can even customize the tool palettes to show only the tools you'll use.

The Smart Shape tool is available for entering slurs, trills, dynamic hairpins, octave symbols, glissandos, and more. The Smart Shape tool's curves and lines are “smart” in the sense that they adapt their shape and size automatically, stretching and shrinking to accommodate changes in the music and automatically adjusting to span the next system of music if needed. Smart tools such as glissandos and dynamic hairpins are also automatically reflected in the score playback.

Another longtime feature of Finale is Metatools. Metatools are macros that let you assign customized keystrokes to enter a particular notational symbol. For example, when using the Articulation tool, the default Metatool for an accent is the A key, and the Metatool for staccato is the S key. If you click on a note while holding those keys, you instantly create the articulation. You can also lasso-select a group of notes while holding the appropriate key to enter many articulations at once. Entering symbols in this way is extremely fast and efficient.

One of my favorite features in Finale is Scroll view. Though you can view a score as it will appear on the page (Page view), Scroll view allows you to see it as a continuous staff flowing across the screen from left to right. I haven't seen this option in many other notation programs, but it's useful, especially during the early stages of composition.

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