Fermata Friday: 8 Great Finale Tips

For today's Fermata Friday post, here is a post from Finale's blog on tips to learn and use the program more efficiently.

8 great tips for Finale:

1. QuickStart Videos: Find them in Finale’s Help menu or Launch Window. Don’t know how to get started? Don’t read manuals? These videos were created for you!

2. The Selection tool lets you do nearly anything. To select it with a two-button mouse, right-click. Have a one-button mouse? Then ctrl-click. With the Selection tool chosen, you can click on just about any item in Finale and subsequently manipulate it.

3. Selection tool keystrokes: Once you’ve selected something with the Selection tool, you can change it:

• Easy interval transposition? Experiment with typing 6, 7, 8, or 9
• Move measures? Use up/down arrows to move measures to adjacent staff systems
• Check range? Go to Plug-ins> Scoring and Arranging>Check Range

4. When using Simple Note Entry, these keyboard shortcuts can really speed things up:

• Entering an eighth note? Type a 4 on your numpad. Want a larger duration? Use a larger number, and so on.
• Type 0 to enter a rest for a selected duration
• Type r to change a note to a rest
• Type . (period) to add an augmentation dot to a note or rest

5. More Simple Entry tips!

• To select an existing note, ctrl-click it (Windows) or option-click it on a Mac
• Remember the Re-pitch tool on the Simple Entry Palette: it’s the whole note with arrows
• Have a laptop? Go to: Simple menu>Simple Entry Option>Edit Keyboard Shortcuts>Keyboard Shortcut Set

6. Other Simple Entry shortcuts: the x and * keystrokes (the ` keystroke on laptops) allow you to select the Expression and Articulation tools from within Simple Entry. From there you can use the same keystrokes you’d use within the Expression and Articulation tools, like:

• Expressions – to enter a forte: 4
• Articulations – to enter a staccato: s

7. Drag-Select: Within the Expression and Articulation tools, you can hold down a keyboard shortcut (like the 4=forte expression above) and drag-select several notes to add multiple staccatos.

8. SmartShape tool shortcuts:

• Select the slur tool: s
• Select the crescendo tool: <

Here is a link to the full article

Check out the Learning Center's resource page for Finale and Sibelius for more links, and for training sessions.

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Waveform Wednesday: Beef Up Your Kick Drums

Do you find your kick drum to be weak in the mix, or not as powerful/punchy/full/heavy/[insert other descriptive word here] as you would like? Use your kick drum to trigger a low sub synth sound to fatten up the bottom (or eat a lot of twinkies).

You can do this in any number of DAWs, but I’ll walk through the setup in Logic.
Route your kick drum track out through a bus. I’m using a pattern sequenced in Ultrabeat, so I created a multi-output Ultrabeat and routed the kick through output 3-4 in order to isolate it.


Then create an aux track for output 3-4 from the Ultrabeat (click on the + on the U.B. mixer track). The kick is now isolated on this aux track.

Set up a bus send assignment on the aux track, which in Logic will automatically create another aux.

It becomes very important to name your tracks and stay organized. Get in the habit of doing this now and you’ll save yourself headaches later. I named them Kick and Kick sub

Option-click on the send amount from Kick, which in Logic will move it to the default position (0 db). Now we are sending signal to the kick sub aux. Insert a test oscillator plug-in on the sub synth track. It will immediately play a tone, so make sure the volume is not too loud. Change the frequency to around 60 Hz (very common for this type of application).

This 60 Hz tone will be triggered every time the kick drum plays. To set this up, add a noise gate plug-in after the test oscillator.

Set the side-chain input of the noise gate to bus 1


You are now in business! Adjust the noise gate release accordingly, and mix in with the original kick to your taste. Download my session file here.

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Mac Daddy Monday: The iLife Suite Aps

Welcome to iLife ‘11. iLife is a suite of applications that includes iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD. The Learning Center offers training and tutoring sessions on these applications and more, starting with our iLife Suite Overview session this Friday, May 20th at 11am. Sign up here! Learn to use them all, and you have a portable studio with your new Berklee laptop. Let’s go through the aps:

iPhoto is an editor, organizer and sync-er for your digital images. Crop images, apply black and white and sepia tone effects, remove red eye and upload directly to Facebook. iPhoto can organize your photos with great sophostication as well.

With iMovie, you can import video from a camcorder, or take video directly from your laptop’s built-in camera, and edit. You can create transitions, effects, titles, add music and more. When your video project is finished, upload directly to youtube, or export to iDVD to burn a disc.

GarageBand is a powerful, easy-to-use music creation application. Sequence MIDI data using your Oxygen25 MIDI controller, with one of GarageBand’s many built-in virtual instruments. Right out of the box you can lay down drums, bass, guitar, keyboard, synth and more. Plug a microphone into your UX2 audio interface and record audio into GarageBand as well.

A simple DVD authoring application, iDVD allows you to build DVD menus, import audio, create slideshows, import video files, and burn to a DVD to send back home, or to watch on your television. This makes for a powerful demo creation tool.

Now its easy to build your own website with iWeb’s drag and drop, template-based interface. Create new pages for videos, photos, a bio and a home page and publish to your web hosting account.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/

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