(I don't think this went through the first time [or the second time], sorry if it is a repeat. It's my last try, I promise)
Hello list, A couple of weeks ago I wrote in with some questions about creating medieval (neumes) notation in Finale. (see the thread: [Finale] Neumes/Gregorian Chant Notation). Well, we received the plug-in today and I just went through the tutorial: The output is just as nice as it looked on the web page samples. It provides you a tool bar with 12 new tools that are specific to the notation, two templates and two fonts with .fan files provided. For the most part it is really quite elegant, and pleasantly assumes some base knowledge of Medieval notation, in that a lot of the ligature changes are created through combining of the actual pitches they represent. (Which I find handy, others may disagree). One interesting feature is that it deals with the problem of meter, (or lack thereof actually), by dealing with meter for you. You basically over-fill measures and then Medieval has tools that work around these spacing problems and allow you to enter a lot of notes and make them look good. I'm honestly a little weirded out when I'm taken out of the equation for dealing with something Finale does, but I think it might be something I could get used to. (At least in this specific case). Here's how typical entry goes: You enter all the pitches in a "measure" as quarter notes using speedy or simple entry. (Making sure that check for overfull measures is off, jump to next measure, etc and all that stuff is off). You select your entries using mass edit, and use the spacing tool provided with medieval. You use select partial measures to edit and group pitches together by creating ligatures, cycle through various noteheads, add special symbols, etc. Finally, there are nudge tools that allow you to fine tune the positioning of gropus or single pitches. Handy. The fonts offer a decent variety of characters and I feel they all look pretty elegant. Seems like a worthwhile purchase if Medieval notation is your thing. -Scot for more info: http://www.klemm-music.de/medieval/ if you are interested in purchasing, I'm reminded that Nick Carter's company sells it domestically in the US: www.npcimaging.com ; otherwise it's coming from Deutchland. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
