There is a fantastic thread over at the Finale Windows Forum discussing the different ways that people proof their scores before submission or first rehearsal. (there are even handouts!!)

Personally, having lived with the tune for as long as it takes me to arrange or compose, I print everything out (score and parts) and go over each measure of each staff line with a red pen.  I don’t single out a specific items, but instead focus on the measure as a whole.  I will then go back into Finale, make my corrections and repeat the process on screen at around 200% zoom.

I will never start my final proofing until I am completely satisfied with the layout before I start my finale proofing.

In the first post about creating the pickup measure we talked about using the automatic option found under the Document Menu.

This is the easiest way to create the pickup measure, but it will not playback correctly (it will still count the full measure worth of beats), there is very little control over the individual beat spacing of the measure, and staff styles do not display correctly (this is most often seen when applying a staff style that is tied to the measures time signature like rhythm or slash notation).

The “real” way to create pickup measures is to simply change the pickup measure’s time signature to reflect the actual amount of beats that comprise the pickup.  Then apply the “Use a Different Time Signature for Display” option to keep the original time signature for display.  This will playback correctly and give you complete control over the spacing.

It is a few extra steps, but having the control is worth it.

There are two ways to create pickup measures within Finale - the easy way, and the right way.

The easy way is of course to use the Pickup Measure Option located under the Document Menu.

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This would seem like a fairly straight forward topic, but I actually receive a lot of questions about setting the actual on screen page size within Finale.  The reason there is such confusion is that there are three different areas within the Finale program that can control page size - well, three different areas that seem like they should control page size.

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Occasionally you may run into a situation where you are missing measures or even pages when you switch from Scroll View to Page View.

An easy fix that probably works around 95% of the time is to redefine the pages using the Page Layout Tool.

Here is how:

Click on your Page Layout tool and then go up to your Page Layout Menu.

From the menu select Redefine Pages >> All Pages.

What this will do is to re-apply the page margins to your document, usually fixing the issue of missing measures/pages.

Have a great and productive weekend!

Sometimes when dealing with page layout we need greater control of optimization than simply running the option from the Page Layout Menu.

Let’s take a look at this file as an example:

If you were to apply optimization using your Page Layout Tool you would lose both the Soprano and Alto voices. But if you wanted to control the optimization to allow for the soprano voice to display, even with blank measures, you could manually optimize the Alto voice leaving you with just the empty Soprano part and the Piano part.

Here is how:

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When using a grand staff, such as a piano, marimba or harp, Finale considers it a single instrument comprised of two staves. This means that applying optimization with your Page Layout tool will not remove any measures of the instrument unless both the top and bottom staves of the instrument are empty.

This setting can be changed to allow for normal optimization of the instrument allowing the optimization of a single staff from the grand staff. Here are the steps:

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