With both software packages, the possibilities in terms of notation and playback are extraordinarily good.
This has made it a rival of Sibelius with composers and publishers alike for many years. Like Sibelius, Finale is written to produce exceptional scores ranging from simple piano scores through to compositions for a one-hundred strong symphony orchestra. Phil Farrand is credited as the first author of Finale that is currently in its twenty-sixth incarnation.
It is often assumed that Sibelius was the first notation software but Finale reached the notation market first in 1988 with versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers.
This did not make a significant impact on the popularity of Sibelius that was soon adopted by many leading composers and publishing houses, celebrated for its ease of use, functionality, stability, and beautiful printed scores. In these very first years of Sibelius, it ran only on Windows and Risk computers, only a little later making its way onto the Macintosh computers. The result was Sibelius, named after the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. These guys had had enough of writing out music by hand and decided, very profitably as it turns out, to design a piece of software that could make the task less laborious. Sibelius was the first notation program I spent money on back in 1993 when it was first released by Cambridge based brothers Jonathan and Ben Finn. For this article, I am going to take a look at two of the leading software programs that are in the first category that musical notation. These are ones designed to produce professional-looking scores, the same as you would buy from a publisher, and those created to produce ‘sequenced’ compositions that use virtual instruments. If you set values in for two or even three of these playback effects, they will play back their various attributes when the marking is applied to a note.Essentially, there are two different types of software programs in common use amongst composers today.
This isn’t what you might call typical UI design for a popup menu on Mac or PC, however, it works just fine, as long as you know that the various parameters for each popup setting are brought to the foreground for editing when you select the popup.
As you change the popup menu, the values associated with that popup menu setting change in the text fields: Both of these effects playback when an accented staccato is applied to a note.
If you’ve ever opened Finale’s Articulation Designer (Opt.-Click or Alt.-Click on the Articulation tool to open the dialog), you have probably seen the “Playback Effect” settings:įinale’s Articulation Designer allows the user to select and define a Playback Effect for each Articulation, but did you know that you can define more than one playback effect at the same time for an articulation?įinale’s flexibility is easy to miss here, because there is a single popup menu which functions simultaneously for three different playback parameters Change Attack, Change Duration and Change Key Velocity:įor instance, to define playback for the accented staccato articulation, under Playback Effects, Change Duration is set to 50% (top and bottom) and change velocity is set to 125% (top and bottom).