I got another song into Finale, another of the four Goldenshteyn pieces we got last Tuesday in klezmer class. This one is his “Rushishe Sher”. A sher (pronounced like share, what you learn to do in kindergarten) is a lot like a square dance. It can go on and on, like a square dance, until each couple gets a turn at all the figures. Some shers are sort of medleys with snippets of all the Russian dance tunes you’ve ever heard.
Anyway, I finally am at the point where I love Finale. I’m finding easier ways to do what I want with it. Here are the key tricks I used:
1. Start with a piece orchestrated for two parts, violin and cornet. Enter all the music on the violin staff. When you use the mass edit tool to drag it to the cornet staff, it all transposes, pouf!
2. The mass edit tool does one measure at a time if you click inside a measure, but if you click above the staff you can drag a rectangle around a bunch of measures and copy them all at once.
3. You can change a note’s pitch by a half tone by pressing the numeric keypad + or – key while the note is highlighted. When you’ve done that in a measure, further notes of that name (other b’s if you’ve changed a key-signature b-flat to natural) will have the same pitch as the first. You have to do that ALL the time in klezmer tunes, which have a lot of consistent accidentals. For instance, this one is written in the key of three flats, but all the b’s are naturals. So fix those pitches right away! This is much more convenient than using the “+ 1/2” tool on the simple entry palette, because it only effects the one selected note (and others of that name in the same measure) whereas the “+ 1/2” tool stays in effect until you click on it again.
4. You can get a dotted note by pressing the keypad decimal point key when a note is highlighted. Like the numeric keypad “+” versus the “+1/2” tool, this only effects one note so you don’t have to move the mouse again to deselect it.
5. Use the numeric keypad to change note lengths as much as possible. Much faster than mousing to the note value palette.