Since I have a music education background as well as a performing background, I wanted the best music publishing program out. I started with the very first version 1.0 of Finale and have upgraded from there. I have to admit, the learning curve on this program is a bit steep. If it's any consolation to you new users, it took me somewhere around 45 hours from start to finish on the first song that I transcribed. But the program has gotten a lot easier since then! And the power behind it is tremendous. FINALE is part of CODA Music Technology and they do have good technical support as well.

MASS MOVER TOOL

I will touch on a few of my favorite functions of this tool and tell you how they've come out. Most of the Mass Edit commands work on selected regions as a small as a single beat, or as large as the entire score. Most commands display dialog boxes in which you specify your preferences.

With the Mass Mover and Mass Editing menus, you can change any selected measure's key, time signature, spacing, measure widths, layer assignments, stem direction, beaming patterns and so on.

Mass Edit is one of the most important menus in FINALE. It can make global changes to large selections of music at once.

If you'd like a free lead sheet of CHARADE, you can download it off this website. The transcription was done on FINALE.

HYPERSCRIBE TOOL

The HYPERSCRIBE TOOL is one of Finale's real-time transcription tools. On one project, I used one of the templates from version 3.5 (not the latest) along with the HYPERSCRIBE TOOL and I was pretty amazed at the final copy.

I was writing the piano part for a short classical violin solo and entered, with the HYPERSCRIBE TOOL, the violin part. Then, as I played in the piano part that I was composing on the fly, the violin part was playing at the same time so I could hear more clearly how the parts would work together. I left my Tap function to play on note 72 (C above middle C), for the metronome. I then saved what I wanted and went back and changed the measures that needed to be notated a bit differently or that I just plain didn't like.

By using the pre-made template, there was already a place for the title, etc, so I just went to the TITLE TOOL and made the changes neccessary. The nice surprise was when I actually printed out the somple one-page piece of music, the violin part was already reduced to 75% and the piano part was regular size, which was just what I wanted. It looked great.

This tool will also transcribe music being played by an external sequencer or another computer equipped to transmit a MIDI Sync Symbol. FINALE will automatically "sync up" to it.

REFERENCE MANUALS

I love the QUICK REFERENCE CARD because it puts all the basic commands on a laminated foldover card. It has the Petrucci Music Font key-shift control commands for all the musical symbols you may need, even for a large orchestration project. I like everything on one page, even if I don't use all of the symbols.

I usually play my piano/vocal lines in and set my split points & quantinization by hand as I go. If I was doing a full orchestration, I'd import my midi-files through the HYPERSCRIBE TOOL.

So if you're not afraid of a learning curve, don't be afraid to try this program. It's well-organized and it's been around long enough to have gotten a lot of the bugs out of it. The manuals are exhaustive on almost every area of music notation and are well-written and laid out (3 books!). I love this program.