Creating a Chorus/Refrain in PrintMusic?

[AlexCJones]

I am using Finale PrintMusic 2011.

I just finished formatting a song that has 7 verses, and a chorus. There is nothing in the documentation about a chorus, but there must be a way to have a chorus secion with a nice big curly bracket that marks the end of the verses, and then a single line for the chorus centered vertically.

At first, I just included the chorus as part of the first verse, but none of the others, and for the rest of the verses, there appeared placehoder lines. I figured out that to get rid of the extra horizontal lines, I added a Hard Space to the ends of verses 2-7, and that got rid of the extra lines. But a chorus is just a normal part of songs, at least in the English-Speaking world, so this should be a normal capability of a scoring tool. Also, when I use the Product comparison tool for all of the Finale products, nothing indicates that any of the tools have this capability.

[miker]

Welcome to the forum.
PM won't do this automatically. There are a couple of ways around it.

You can extend your chorus from the middle line of your lyrics.

You can enter the chorus in any verse. Then, in the lyrics menu, select Adjust Syllables. A handle will appear on each syllable. Click/drag around the ones you want to move, and use the mouse or the arrow keys to reposition the line.

You can enter the bracket as a text expression. Use the regular bracket in your text font, and enlarge it as needed.

[AlexCJones]

Welcome to the forum.
PM won't do this automatically. There are a couple of ways around it.

You can extend your chorus from the middle line of your lyrics.

You can enter the chorus in any verse. Then, in the lyrics menu, select Adjust Syllables. A handle will appear on each syllable. Click/drag around the ones you want to move, and use the mouse or the arrow keys to reposition the line.

You can enter the bracket as a text expression. Use the regular bracket in your text font, and enlarge it as needed.

Thanks Miker.

I have already been extending the chorus from the middle verse, and then using Adjust Syllables to get rid of those placeholder lines extending from all of the other verses. But, I had not though of using the text expression and adjusting to a large font to get that nice big bracket, so I do appreciate that idea and I'll be using that.

This is a good work-around for now, but it would be much quicker, if there were simply other song sections available in the Lyrics tool, including a chorus section. Are there other Finale products that have this feature? (If so, then it can be an opportunity for the Finale company to sell me another product).

Also it would be cool if the Lyrics tool allowed me to copy & paste the lyrics from a text file into Finale PrintMusic, or import a text file or MS Word or XML file into the lyrics. (Don't worry. I am not stealing copyrighted material. I am transcribing public domain folk songs, then grabbing the lyrics from emails, forum posts. Etc.)

[miker]

The full Finale allows you to separate verses into Verse, Chorus, or Section. I don't use the last two, so I can't really tell you how they work.

Also, the full Finale will allow you to paste lyrics into a Lyrics window, and then click-apply them to the score. I know that some users will do their lyrics in Word, use an online hyphenator, add extra spaces for melismas, and then insert them into the score with one click. Personally, I think it's easier to just type the lyrics into the score. But the lyrics window is very convenient for editing, where people may have gotten the verses misassigned.

Unfortunately, MM broke the function where a hard space stopped the word extensions, in Finale2012. They are aware of it, and I'm hoping they will fix it in an update.