Finale Forum

In the attached Example.musx file, in measures two and four of the Continuo part, there are red lines in the figured bass. I didn't deliberately enter them and discovered that that do appear in the printed copy. How do I get rid of them? Even better how do I prevent them from appearing in the first place?

Harvey

Those are word extensions, used in vocal music. Since you're not doing vocals, go to lyric options and turn off automatic word extensions.

Zuill

Thank you, zuill, that takes care of that. Many thanks.

Harvey

Figured Bass will always be a bit of a fuddle until Finale has a built-in mechanism for writing and "understanding" figured bass, rather than using a tool meant for something else.
The problem with using the Lyric Tool is that you get Word Extensions (which you may want in vocal lines); and you can't add figures between notes, such as 4 # on beats 1 and 3 of a whole note.

One alternative is to use the Chord Tool and write the figures as suffixes: this has the advantage that you can add figures to beats and you don't get extension lines; but you have to set-up all the figures in a suffix library. Finale does come bundled with a library you can load into your documents, though you might want to edit it. It's also more difficult to change the font with minimal issues.

So, advantages and disadvantages to both methods. You could do them all as articulations or expressions, too. The main problem is selecting the particular figure from an extensive library.

Thank you BT; this Chord Tool library of suffixes approach sounds intriguing. Is the library you're referring to documented? What's it's name?

Thanks.

Harvey

OK. I found the chord library. It is documented - well, sort of. It's name is in the doc; I loaded it, but I can't find anything about how to use it. How, for example, do you get the chord-cursor to appear underneath the note you want to figure? How do you access the provided suffixes?

Harvey

You should be able to 'type' under the beats, as with the Lyric Tool. The numeric figures are easy enough, just type 6, 64, 53, etc. Space moves you to the next beat. You can also type :0, which then brings up the suffixes for selection. If you can remember the numbers of the suffixes, then you can type :45 to insert that numbered suffix.
As I say, you may want to edit the suffixes to include more figures, and you may need to delete all the guitar suffixes and other stuff. It's not without difficulty. My point was that until there's a "Figured Bass Tool", any method is going to be a bit of a workaround, with advantages and disadvantages.

With the “chord suffix method” you do not want the chord roots to display.

The fastest solution is probably that you enter all the chord symbols with root displaying.

Then use the utility to de-select (at one fell swoop) the display of all roots:

Utilities menu > Change > Chords…