Finale Forum

Hi. I'm wondering if there's any way to add lyrics to a chord chart containing rhythmic notation for a guitar strumming pattern. In other words, the staff contains the guitar rhythm, but I need to add lyrics below the guitar staff, which have a different rhythm. I've tried attaching the lyrics to a different layer, but that doesn't seem to work in rhythmic notation. Thanks for any help!

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Finale 2014, windows 10

campersand wrote:Hi. I'm wondering if there's any way to add lyrics to a chord chart containing rhythmic notation for a guitar strumming pattern. In other words, the staff contains the guitar rhythm, but I need to add lyrics below the guitar staff, which have a different rhythm. I've tried attaching the lyrics to a different layer, but that doesn't seem to work in rhythmic notation. Thanks for any help!

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Finale 2014, windows 10

Yes. Enter your lyrics as Text, not Lyrics.

I really don't like Finale for this, however. I create my chord/rhythm chart in Finale and export as a PDF. Now you can open your PDF file in any graphics program that allows you to enter text. My favorite is Adobe Photoshop Elements—much easier than using a PDF editor such as Preview or Adobe Acrobat Pro. I'm on a Mac but there are a number of Win programs that let you do this.

Anyway, I enter lines of text and drag those lines where I want them. I use spacing and dashes to get the spacing exactly how I want. Unlike Finale or a PDF editor, I don't have to fight the application to get my lines exactly how and where I like.

You can do it in Word but PDF files imported aren't as crisp and the entire file shrinks to the page margins.

Thanks for the great answer, Mike! I have Photoshop so I'll try that.

I prefer to do this all in Finale, if possible. If you enter the rhythm for the lyrics in another layer, keep the option to hide the notes, but select the option to show the lyrics. If you don't want to have the notes play back, there are ways to accomplish that as well.

Zuill

zuill wrote:I prefer to do this all in Finale, if possible. If you enter the rhythm for the lyrics in another layer, keep the option to hide the notes, but select the option to show the lyrics. If you don't want to have the notes play back, there are ways to accomplish that as well.

Zuill

Hey Zuil, that would be much easier but for some reason my lyrics aren't showing up even with the lyrics checkbox checked in Staff Styles window. Is there somewhere else I need to select that option?

By the way, good to see you've come over to this forum! You answered a bunch of questions for me on the other one as well.

Not in the main page, but in the Alternate Notation page, under Other Layers.

Zuill

Perfect, thanks!

zuill wrote:I prefer to do this all in Finale, if possible. If you enter the rhythm for the lyrics in another layer, keep the option to hide the notes, but select the option to show the lyrics. If you don't want to have the notes play back, there are ways to accomplish that as well.

Zuill

Yep. That works and how I did it once upon a time. My way is much, much faster for me, especially with multiple verses.

The important thing is to find something that works.

I wouldn't use Photoshop for editing PDFs from Finale. For starters, you'll massively increase the filesize when you save as a bitmap image, and secondly, you've converted your crisp vectors to bitmap.
Use a vector drawing package like Affinity Design or iDraw on the Mac, or Inkscape (free, open source), or Illustrator, or other.

BuonTempi wrote:I wouldn't use Photoshop for editing PDFs from Finale. For starters, you'll massively increase the filesize when you save as a bitmap image, and secondly, you've converted your crisp vectors to bitmap.
Use a vector drawing package like Affinity Design or iDraw on the Mac, or Inkscape (free, open source), or Illustrator, or other.

I can see that. Just for kicks, I saved the changes in Elements (which I never do) and the resulting file size was a .psd of 4.4mB. Not what I want or ever get.

I've been doing this for so many years, I hadn't paid attention to my actual work process—here it is:

When I create the page in Finale, the .pdf might be 53K and when I'm done in PSE, it might be 227K. I do not save the file, however. I print to .pdf from within the app instead and renaming it so that it doesn't overwrite. When I close PSE and it asks to save changes to the original, I click No so that the original file is unaltered. I have no problem with 227kB page sizes and neither do my publishers.

I just did this now to see. It took me all of 5 minutes to mark up some files, save them four different ways and examine file sizes just now.