Finale/PrintMusic help
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 429
    I am a rank neophyte in the use of music notation software.

    I recently used PrintMusic, a scaled-down version of Finale, to typeset the hymn, "Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendor" to Healey Willan's tune, St. Osmund.

    The bar lines extend through the text. Is there a way in which I can correct this problem?
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    Bruce:

    Not sure about Finale, but in Sibelius all you do is grab the bottom of the barline and move it up and it shifts out of the white area where text would be located. Give it a try!
  • Steve CollinsSteve Collins
    Posts: 1,021
    In Finale, it's part the Staff Attributes. It only appears when you have multiple staves. It really helps to go through as many of the drop-down menus as possible just to see where all your options are hidden. Finale is not a difficult program. I can have a melody line only hymn ready to insert in a MSWord document in less than 15 minutes. Another 15 minutes, and I've added the rest of the hymn accompaniment and saved it as another file.
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 429
    Steve: Thank you. Your suggestion worked. Unfortunately, I'm now wrestling with another problem. The verse alignment I carefully accomplished in scroll view (according to the directions in the manual) did not survive a return to page view. The stanzas have all run together. I suppose I can re-align them in page view. But what is the point of entering (and aligning) the stanzas in scroll view if you have to re-do your work in page view?

    I don't use the hymn template because the documents it produces are too small. Our leaflets are 7 x10, and hymns typeset with the template look strange and waste an inordinate amount of space.
  • JDE
    Posts: 588
    Bruce,

    go under Lyrics | Adjust baselines.

    It sets the first verse to -0.5" automatically; the others are set 0.15" below. Generally speaking i find it helpful to do .25" apart, so set the 2nd verse to -0.75, 3rd to -1.0, etc. etc. At least I think that will work in PrintMusic. I only have the regular Finale.
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 429
    Thank you, Yurodivi.

    I ended up sending the document to Noel Jones, who cleaned it up for me. But I intende to continue practicing until I develop enough skill to use the program when I need it.
  • priorstf
    Posts: 460
    Yurodivi - Thanks for the info. It is SOOO close. Sadly I have "Print Music" which doesn't seem to have an "adjust baselines" option and doesn't even have the word "baseline" in the online help index. I guess they really want that last few hundred dollars.
  • Steve CollinsSteve Collins
    Posts: 1,021
    At least Coda offers a church discount these days. It used to be only a school discount. Get the parish to pony up for it!
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    Sibelius offered a huge discount when I bought in. Not sure about now.
Add a Comment