Finale Forum

In Finale 2009 in the Expression Selection window, one of the provided Tempo Marks shows two eighth-notes beamed together, plus a triplet bracket.

If EngraverTextT font is used, pressing 'e' creates separate 16th notes, but I need them to be beamed. How can beamed 16th (& 8th) notes be created within the Expression Selection/Tempo Marks/Edit/Shape/Create window?

Also, where can that triplet bracket be found? I need to use it over three beamed 8th notes (in Expression Tool/Tempo Marks).

All suggestions will be appreciated.

I seem to recall reading that that particular expression was done as a graphic, and not created in the normal way.

Indeed the "Swing" expression was created as a shape expression (with the shape created in the Shape Designer).


One solution to your problem is to duplicate the existing "Swing" expression, and edit the duplicate.
It takes some time to learn the Shape Designer, but the Shape Designer is really just a drawing environment inside Finale.


Another solution is to create a text expression with a music font designed for use in text, like the Bach font or the Opus Text font.


However, when using a font you have to accept the layout you get from the font creator.
You can't customize the layout, like e. g. the distance between the notes or the stem thickness or the stem length or the beam thickness.

If you want full control over the layout, then the Shape Designer is the solution.

You can get the Bach font on this web site:
http://www.mu.qub.ac.uk/tomita/bachfont/

You can get the Opus Text font by downloading and installing the Sibelius demo.

Thanks for both of your responses, miker and Peter.

My goal is to have three beamed eighth notes under a triplet slur/phrase/bracket, then an equal sign, then four beamed sixteenth notes. I've duplicated the existing "Swing" expression, and tried to edit the duplicate, but haven't had much success.

Does this mean that I'll need to construct the notes using various graphical components, i.e., note heads, vertical lines, horizontal lines, etc. - all within Shape Designer?

A step-by-step procedure, including which font to use (EngraverTextT?), would be very helpful.

If that's the way that Finale's existing "Swing" example was constructed, so be it. Just seems like an awful lot of work is required, when Finale can construct beamed notes & tuplets so easily in other situations.

If designing the expression in Shape designer seems too complicated, I can think of an alternative. It should work :
in another document, in 2/4, create a staff without lines, enter the notes, add the equal sign in between (make adjustments if needed) and save the whole thing as a graphic file (using the Graphics tool or a screenshot software). Reduce its size if needed.

Then, with "place graphics", import that graphic file in your current file. (The graphic file should be present in all the parts...)

Update : using the export selection in Graphics menu produced a tiff file which, reimported (using place graphics) was without stems.
A screenshot (like the jpg attached) done with Snapz Pro (Mac) worked fine.
(NB : The green paper colour is in my preferences).

elmo wrote:...My goal is to have three beamed eighth notes under a triplet slur/phrase/bracket...

Actually it isn't necessary to put a bracket/slur on beamed notes if the triplet number is on the beam side.
I suppose that you want upstem notes with a '3' above them, like in Michels example?

elmo wrote:...Does this mean that I'll need to construct the notes using various graphical components, i.e., note heads, vertical lines, horizontal lines, etc. - all within Shape Designer?...

Only if you want to have full control of all parameters (stem length, beam thickness &c.).

In your music fonts you have a quarter note glyph with notehead and vertical stem.
If you use a such quarter note glyph, you save a few steps, but then you can't control stem thickness and stem length individually, since these parameters are scaled with the font's Point size.

You can also save some steps by using a music font designed for use in text, like the Bach font or the Opus Text font.
In the Shape Designer you can create a text string with characters from Bach or OpusText.

elmo wrote:...A step-by-step procedure, including which font to use (EngraverTextT?), would be very helpful...

EngraverTextT is a good choice.
It's designed for exactly this use, and it's beautiful (much more beautiful than the Maestro font which has too long stems on its note characters).

A step-by-step procedure will be quite many words, so I will do better than that:
The attached file contains a Finale 2009 .mus document with the shape you need.

You can save the expression as a Finale library, and load it into your other Finale documents (and into your Finale templates).

I'd like to say thank you for uploading that file! It makes life much easier and saved me an hour of messing around.

Yes, writing it in as music and grabbing it with the graphic tool was how I got around it. I could find the equals sign with the option key plus a letter in the usual expression design box. I just stuck that in the middle then. Not ideal though.