Finale for Composers

After countless hours of using Finale, hundreds of phone calls from musicians asking for help in Finale, and 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 take 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.