I find myself aligned with the two Davids - thinking about and
entering the music more or less the way they describe as natural to
them, but I can't tell if that's because Finale's Speedy Entry
methods have trained me to be that way, or if Speedy just suits my
way of operating. My jury will be out on the subject until I have
spent some time trying out the other method. When I'll take time to
do that is anybody's guess, but I will give it a try, because I've
seen those MM guys (mostly Tom Johnson) fly with it.
Chuck
On Oct 4, 2006, at 2:43 PM, dhbailey wrote:
David W. Fenton wrote:
[snip]
I tried it out in the Finale 2005 demo. It feels a lot like
Sibelius's standard keypad entry method.
And that means I HATE IT. I don't think that way about getting the
information into Finale, and that's one of the reasons I can't use
Sibelius.
It slows me down incredibly to think through which things I want
to attach to a note after it's been entered (or before, if you can
forecast that). For me (and I said FOR ME), a pass to get notes
and rhythms entered is VERY FAST, and then I can go back and
entered the articulations/expressions, set beam breaks, stem
direction and correct enharmonics. I do all of the latter in a
single pass, in fact.
And that's the way I did it in Speedy with no MIDI keyboard. I
just don't think in a way that allows me to be constantly
switching between so many different kinds of entry. The notes and
rhythms come first as a framework for the whole piece, and then
the rest of the data is editing or entirely cosmetic.
Perhaps I'm stuck in that mindset because I've been doing it that
way for over 15 years.
I'm with you on this point David -- I find that I can fly through
note entry and then go back and do the expressions and
articulations on a second and third pass and can work very fast.
Every time I have to change something while in the middle of the
basic note entry, as has to happen in Simple Entry if one is trying
to enter the articulations at the same time as the notes, it really
slows my workflow down.
What's terrific about Finale is that there are the two entry
methods, simple and speedy.
And speedy is what works best to my mind (for me, I'm not claiming
it should be this way for anybody else) which is why I can't work
quickly or efficiently in Sibelius.
Just yesterday, my son was staying after school to help a young
woman transpose an english horn part so she could play it on her
oboe (octave displacement not being a consideration), and they were
using the music department computer which has Sibelius on it. They
managed to get the english horn part copied just as it was on the
page and couldn't figure out how to get it changed for oboe.
so they called me. Now in finale, just a couple of mouse clicks to
change the key signature and have the notes transpose upward and
they would have been all set in a couple of seconds. In sibelius,
nowhere in the manual is there an entry for changing the key
signature for music already entered. So I had to fly by the seat
of my pants and triple-click to enclose the entire staff, then get
three menu levels deep to the tranpose dialogue, and set things in
there. took much longer. I realize that some of that was because
I had to figure out how to do it without the help of the manual,
but now that I know how to do it, it will still take much longer
than using Finale's key signature tool.
Why Finale felt they needed to make their note entry mimic
Sibelius' is beyond me. But thank goodness they left speedy entry
alone!
Whether it's an ingrained pattern of workflow from using Finale for
so long I can't tell, but I do know that it took me very little
time to convert from MusicPrinterPlus to Finale and it's taken me
ages to try to convert to Sibelius and I still can't do it, my mind
just doesn't work that way.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Chuck Israels
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