At 4:32 PM 11/25/02, Christopher BJ Smith wrote: [answering Éric Dussault] >>Of course staff styles work great in such situations. But >>Christopher, if Linda is working on a score and wants later to >>extract parts, your method of entering many instruments/singers on >>the same staff with staff styles promises to be a nightmare when >>extracting parts. Ok for the staff styles, but keep one staff per >>extracted parts if you don't want to get into trouble.
[Christopher:] >I assume that individual singers' staves won't be extracted - they >will probably stay on the same part. Actually, for this scenario, I >would assign different staves to each singer and optimise out the >empty ones, but there may be some other reason why this is >impractical. In piano-vocal scores for opera or musical theater, it is common style to let the characters share a staff during passages where two or more characters alternate short lines. As an extreme example, consider the first scene in _The Music Man_, with the salesmen on the train. That piece would be bloated out of control if each voice were kept on a separate staff. I understand your concerns about extracting parts, but it seems to me that keeping the voices exclusively on separate staves is letting the software dictate typography, which I don't think is really acceptable here. There are many instances where characters sharing a staff greatly improves the layout, and those opportunities shouldn't be sworn off just for the sake of satisfying Finale's one-staff-equals-one-voice structure -- especially if there are no plans for part extraction or MIDI playback anyway. One technique I've sometimes used, which lets you have it both ways, is to keep the characters on separate staves but position the staves to overwrite each other exactly in Page View. This can require hiding rests and adding superfluous clef changes, but that's not as onerous as it may seem at first, and in many cases it's worth the extra effort. (And of course you still need a Staff Style if you're using staff labels.) mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
