Don Hart wrote: > I would be curious to know how other university music departments (I think > we have a few other representatives that participate on this list) handle > the learning curve in Finale. Does everyone else view it being as daunting > a process as John and Va. Tech do?
OK, I've taught a music publishing course at Sydney Uni, the first half of which deals with Finale (7-8 weeks). What I did was first to start the students for a week or two on Notepad and/or PrintMusic. This has the advantage of both being able to give the students an easy introduction to the Finale 'world', and also, let them find out some of the limitations of these applications so they're really looking forward to some of the new features of Finale. For some people, the Notepad/Print Music features are all that they want or need. A lot of music students end up being teachers, so I figure that it's great for them to know that these products exist, and in the case of Notepad, that it's free and their students can download and use it. Then I work through the toolsets in Finale proper, giving them features and little assignments using those new tools that they've learnt - use it or lose it. This covers inputting folksongs with lyrics to reproducing 2 pages or so of a Messiaen piano piece. After they do the Messiaen, they've really learnt a lot. So, I think if it's taught well, Finale isn't particularly daunting. The problem is that many people just try to jump straight in to Finale on their own, without doing a course or going through the tutorials, and then wonder why it doesn't really work so well for them. They don't get to learn of the many tricks (e.g. the up-arrow/down-arrow push-bars trick to push measures, the whole concept of metatools etc.) that make Finale so powerful. Matthew _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
