Finale Forum

Here's a simple question that I can't seem to find an answer for in Finale documentation.

I have a four-part chorale notated on a grand staff with the SA on the upper staff and TB on the lower.

Is there a way to explode the layers in the grand staff onto a separate staff for each layer? Thanks for any advice!

suite401 wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 22, 2022 4:59 pm

… I have a four-part chorale notated on a grand staff with the SA on the upper staff and TB on the lower …

Are you using layers? - like for the upper staff, S in Layer 1, A in Layer 2, and similarly for the lower staff T in Layer 1, B in Layer 2?

- Or are they in the same layer, with two noteheads on a shared stem?

In either case (separate layers, or "hymnal style" shared staves) JW Staff Polyphony is a great help.

But as Peter says, more information is always helpful!

Hi, thanks for the replies.

I am writing chorale-style, with soprano/alto on the upper staff and tenor/bass on the lower, with each voice allocated to one layer. Only four notes sound on each beat.

I used the wrong term in my earlier post. Sorry.

What I meant to say is are you using shared stems, that is, do you have the soprano and alto notes on the same stem; that is, a two note chord?

Can you post a screenshot?

Hi, thanks again for the reply. I am not using multiple notes on one stem. Each note gets its own stem.

There's supposed to be a built-in utility called "Explode music" that does this, but as far as I can tell it plain doesn't work, unless they've fixed it since Finale 2014.5, which seems unlikely.

Best to download the JW Staff polyphony plug-in. Add a new staff below each of the existing staves, then select each of your original staves one at a time and do this:
and this
to get this

You can also do by using View Active Layer Only, and copy/paste/delete. The plug in does it all with just a couple of clicks.

Thanks all for your help!

Hi, this look familiar;-). Keep up the great work folks, Cheers

Was just struggling with this as JW Polyphony for some reason wasn't working (I might need to update it). But I have TGTools Pro, which worked on one click. I couldn't find a Lua script that did this.