Finale NotePad® 2006 -- Review and Tutorial -- Page 2

You're on Finale NotePad® 2006 review and tutorial page 2.

I hope you are enjoying this tutorial/review so far...let's continue!

Sight-singing for the 21st Century...If you've been confused or disappointed by other methods, click here!

Check it out! Zuill's suggestion to press "L" while on a note works!

On my system, I don't need to capitalize the "L", I just press "l" to flip the stem.

In order to select notes in any measure I like; however, I've had to come up with a bit of a unique procedure.
1. Check that you have your desired layer selected in the lower left corner of the application.
2. Use the simple entry tool and select the value of a note in the measure you'd like to work on.
3. "Re-enter" a note in the measure by clicking on it.
4. Use the right arrow key to activate the simple entry caret.
5. Navigate using the right and left arrow keys to your desired notes and modify the note as desired (in this case by pressing "l" to flip each note)
  
  To avoid needing to flip any stems, I am going to use layers 1 and 2 exclusively. It might be my system, however, only layers 1 and 2 seem to be "behaving" properly. What I mean is that when writing in layer 1 or 2, the layer automatically adjusts the stem direction "more or less" properly. I'd have to check go fairly deep to find out what stem direction rules Finale NotePad follows, but wow, what an interesting question! I'll remember to ask that at the forum! Another reason for my use of layers 1 and 2 is that when I add notes into a second layer, the notes of the other layer flip "correctly."
  
  Just to make things clear...I certainly don't expect everyone to just enter my song into NotePad, you can do so if you like, or you can just enter your own music!
I'm finished with experimentation for now, and I've found a procedure that will work...at least for a while...so on with it.
1. I'm going to clean up my experiments (the notes and measures I don't want) by using the Mass Edit Tool. You can just hover over the icons in the "Main Tool Palette."
  
  If you need to find an icon, I suggest horizontally moving your cursor from left to right over the Palette and watching the words appear.
  
  If you don't know which toolbar is the "Main Tool Palette," select and deselect the various Palettes in the Window menu (or right-click in an "unoccupied" sector of the "Palette Area"). I'm calling the "Palette Area" the gray area surrounding all of the palettes at the top of the application window (under the File, Edit, View, Options, etc. "Main Menu").
2. I deleted the first measure by selecting it using the Mass Edit tool and pressing Delete on my keyboard. In my first measure, as you can see above, the low e is black (layer 1), and the higher e is red...if I continued with such a layer structure I'd be flipping a whole lot of stems!
  
  You can learn techniques to speed up your notation process in my eBook "How to Write Your Songs Down." The techniques can be applied to notation by hand or computer!
3. I removed the rest of my excess notes by selecting multiple measures (select first measure with the Mass Edit Tool, then Shift-click on the last measure...this works across multiple staves), and then pressing CTRL+X.
4. Now I have a clean slate to work with:
  
  I notice a bit of a Finale flaw, and that's the non-flagged stems being too short...another one for the forum, but let's continue...
My plan is to notate both hands and the opening lyrics for now, just to get a feel for everything, and then I'll do each hand separately, concluding with entering the lyrics.

I've made some progress.

A couple things are "goofy" and I can't find "grace note" in the help. The commercial Finale keystroke ";" does not work to create a grace note, so unless I'm missing something, one is not able to create grace notes in Finale Notepad. There are a couple of different options I could explore for the way the bass notes work and how I hold the harmony notes in the right hand, but I'm just tossing things up there for now.

If you've made it this far, it just struck me that I'd like to ask you if you find it useful that I use a song of mine for this tutorial. I'll face notation challenges particular to this song, yet the way I work through those challenges might be helpful for you...any feedback, comments, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I decided to notate the song in Finale, and now it's time to re-create the professional score as well as possible in Notepad.

Here are three pages of my sheet music, as created in Finale:
We're getting there, we now have our goal: to recreate the pages above using Finale Notepad.

I'll have to look into the best way to depict music online. Maybe there's an EPS viewer or something like that. It would be nice if visitors could click on and enlarge the notation examples, since they look a bit small to me...your suggestions are most welcome!
Finale Notepad Review and Tutorial Page 3