Finale Forum

Does finale allow you to cut a measure or more and past it either on the same staff or another one at a different pitch level?

This would be handy to get the melody segment notation onto a staff that is one octave higher or lower. It would also be handy for tonal imitations.

Thank you for your help.

Jim Adrian

Only to the extent that if you copy from one transposition to another it makes the adjustment. I guess there's also "respect instrument ranges when copying" which tries to transpose by an octave if copying results in out-of-range music, except it sometimes does silly things and is best avoided, in my opinion.

Do you know about the 6,7,8, and 9 keys for transposing? Select music and press one. 6 and 7 are down/up a diatonic step and 8 and 9 are down/up an octave. These are the defaults, but can be reprogrammed.

There's always Utilities/Transpose, of course.

In a college music composition course, our first assignment was to compose a plausible Bach fugue. Small figures with a duration of a beat or two or maybe a few beats were written forward, backwards, and upside down. These figures were laboriously copied by hand in all sorts of order experimentally. Now we have computers where cut and paste and copy and paste are routine habits. In text editors, you can past a string in any horizontal or vertical position within the text. It could work the same way in Finale.

If short melody segments could be copied and pasted without then also transposing, the work would be much faster. It seems like a reasonable feature to add to the software.

Jim Adrian

I haven't the foggiest idea of what you are looking for. My abilities and tastes in music are perhaps too straightforward. However, if you don't know it already, you might be interested in a Finale plugin called "Canonic Utilities". It's in the "Scoring and Arranging" plugin folder.

N.

Seems to me you want a computer to do your learning for you.

To move a melody segment up an octave in Finale onto another staff that is set to an octave higher than the first, one must cut and paste the melody segment and then, because the segment is written in the original octave with leger lines as may be needed, one must then transpose the segment up one octave. This transposition could be avoided if a menu option for automatic transposition existed, In that event, one could move a segment, for instance, up a fourth on the same staff and the notes written would be sounded up a fourth diatonically without the extra step of transposing it.

Maybe I wasn't clear when I said that the transposition currently called for could be skipped with an additional option in Finale.

Jim Adrian

One thing to note is that after pasting, the pastee is highlighted so one may transpose that region only.

While you're waiting for Finale to acquire that feature, it's not so hard to copy and then transpose up an octave as you describe. After the copy, select the result of the copy and press 9. No need to invoke the menu.

That doesn't work if you drag-copy: you would then have to highlight the pasted section and transpose. Perhaps that's what the OP was referring to? Either way, to me it doesn't seem like an onerous step to transpose after copying.

jamesadrian wrote:To move a melody segment up an octave in Finale onto another staff that is set to an octave higher than the first, one must cut and paste the melody segment and then, because the segment is written in the original octave with leger lines as may be needed, one must then transpose the segment up one octave …

Jim Adrian,

I do exactly that all the time.

Here are mys steps:
1) Selection Tool.
2) Select the region in the first staff.
3) Hit the number 9 key to transpose the highlighted region up an octave.
4) Hold down Option, and click the other staff where you need the copy.
5) Clear the highlighted region (= hit the Clear key).

Peter Thomsen,

Thank you for your reply.

It seems that there still is not a way to cut and paste within the same staff to change the pitch level of the melody segment. If there is not a way to do this, might a way be added in the future?

Jim Adrian

Same staff or not shouldn't matter. I suspect the reason this is not a feature is that few people would want it. Maybe it's useful for your canon and fugue class, but probably most people wouldn't find it very useful.

Again, not so hard to copy and then transpose. Have you read my suggestion about the 6-7-8-9 keys?

Seems like the OP has been given the answer already but doesn't seem to realize it. Motet's reference to the 6-7-8-9 keys and N. Grossingink suggestion of using the Canonic Utilities plugin would accomplish what the OP is looking for. He could go back to that college course and turn a motif inside and out and Finale would do all of the legwork.