MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
Great tip! Maybe we should start a Finale tip sheet?
OK, make it a notation tip sheet. But certainly relevant to using DP in conjunction with notation and I would think the composing area would be appropriate.
LOL-- thanks. Some of that comes with a measure of blood and sweat from over the past 3-4 months! It's largely a refinement of what I'd been doing anyway.
Basically, I had to look at all the silly things I dreaded dealing with in Finale and then assess how much of that could be avoided by setting it up in DP first. Where some things take about the same effort or where Finale wins over DP, I'll do those tasks in Finale. But I had no idea just how much faster I could soar using Split Notes in DP.
One of the things that still bugs me is that DP still won't save GM file names. Once the SMF is opened in Finale, I always have to create groups just to avoid eye clutter. With more unusual combos of instruments, I have to put in a track name for at least that one instrument. Very time-consuming.
Another trick that works quite well for me is for piano parts: I'll avoid the Grand Staff in DP in favor of the R and L hands on two different MIDI channels. Grand Staff split points drive me nuts in both apps, and they NEVER look right. Among the prefs when opening the SMF in Finale, I'm select "retain voice 2", and the piano part looks a whole lot closer to what I'd want for the final result.
I'll go through the SMF in Finale and edit out all the needless double sharps and double flats where appropriate, and fix any quantization or tuplet interpretation errors.
Once that's done, I'm left with a pretty generic score. I'll make a proper template that matches measure numbers, key sigs and time sigs, then it's a matter of just copying and pasting the data from the SMF "sketch" into the final template. This is done in a matter of seconds.
One thing that still gets to me is doing timp, perc, and harp in DP for use in Finale. Often, VI samples are mapped differently than symphony players find useful. I've not been able to come up with a standard map for DP that works in Finale most of the time, so I'll just compose these parts from scratch directly in Finale. What sounds right in DP can look hideous in Finale, so I'll just skip these instruments in DP. Both DP and Finale assume way too much that go well beyond my level of patience with customizing this stuff.
If the project requires an audio track, it's easier and faster to go back and toss those into DP under a different project name, especially once the parts have been completed in Finale.
That's the latest from the shire.
