Finale Forum

Despite having many years experience using Finale professionally, I freely admit to being an ignoramus where all matters percussion/MIDI/maps/playback are concerned.

In the attached score extract, the timpani/glock/kit staves all play back acceptably. The Percussion stave does not play back.

Can anyone explain why, and provide step-by-step instructions (preferably in a format understandable by a five-year-old) as to what I need to do to get it to work, please?


TIA,

Gareth

The cymbal works but the tambourine doesn't. The reason is that the tambourine is not a sound available in the basic Orchestra Percussion Map. If you look at the Layout, you'll see that it shows that there. if you want both cymbal and tambourine, there's a way to get that. If there are other sounds as well, make sure you figure all that out ahead of time. No sense in choosing a Map that only includes some of the sounds. If one Map has all but one sound, you can assign a different Map to another layer, and put that needed sound in that other layer.

Another approach is to make a custom Map that has all the sounds you want, keeping in mind that the GIfF don't have all the sounds that are available in GPO, so you might be out of luck if what you need you don't have available to you.

So, let us know what is needed and we might be able to help.

Zuill

Thanks, Zuill.

This arrangement won't need anything other than the Cymbal and Tambourine in the Percussion stave. I don't understand the maps/layout thing, but presumably there's no good reason why I shouldn't simply add a fifth percussion stave and select a layout that includes the tambourine as standard, then combine the two staves into one part? (O/T: I don't see for the life of me why "Basic Orchestral Percussion" doesn't include a tambourine; in standard orchestral rep, it doesn't get much more "basic" than tambourine ... )


However, the bigger problem is that in my setup, the cymbal doesn't work either.

After fiddling with your file, I realized that GIfF really doesn't have a nice tambourine sound. Maybe GPO has one.

In any event, the simple cure for this file is to use SmartMusic SoftSynth for the Percussion line. Your soft mallet cymbal wasn't really a soft mallet cymbal sample anyway. The SoftSynth is actually a bit more of a crash. However, maybe being able to hear it, as well as the tambourine is a worthy trade-off.

Can you hear either in my revised file?

Zuill

Thanks, Zuill; your file works fine.

I subsequently discovered that I can also get a tambourine sound from the GIFF Fusion Drum Kit set. So another option would be to use that instead of the Basic Orchestral layout for the 4th percussion stave. But your solution works ok, so long as I can figure out how to duplicate your softsynth setup in my original full score file.

[Still can't figure out why, if there is a tambourine sound in the GIFF kit layout, I can't simply add that sound to the Basic Orchestral layout, as I thought I had done; but then, I can't see why the cymbal sound from the Basic Orchestral doesn't work "out of the box", either …; I don't think I'll ever understand percussion playback in Finale ]

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

G.

If you check the box to indicate a chosen instrument to show in Italics in the Layout that is not available in the Map, you'll see the tambourine is in Italics. And the MIDI number won't show in the list either.

I think the SoftSynth sounds more like a tambourine, in my opinion. The Fusion tambourine sounds like a clunk.

Anyway, I hope you can get this to work.

Zuill