Spatial/Proportional Notation in Finale
Categories: Music, TechnologyToday I learned a key ingredient to writing music in Finale that has notes with no stems. (NOTE: I’m using Finale 2010 in Windows.)
If ALL the notes are stemless, you can go into the Document Settings, click Stems, and change the lengths to ZERO.
HOWEVER, if only some of the notes are stemless, this won’t work, because you can’t undo that Document Setting for just select parts of the document. In a piece I’m writing, most of the notes do not have stems and the “measures” have assigned durations (4″, 7″, etc.), but I have a couple spots in the piece where some of the parts are actually given a time signature. For example, during a 9″ “measure, three of the instruments have two measures of 4/4 with tempo marking of quarter=80, which should last 6 seconds.
During those metered measures, I need to have stems showing. The easiest way to do this is to leave stems normal in the Document Settings and select all the measures that DON’T have stems and apply a Staff Style to them. You can select whole ranges, so it really doesn’t take long. You select the areas that need NO stems and, using the Selection Tool, right-click, choose Staff Style, Apply Staff Style, and choose Stemless Notes (#16 on the list). This way you can quickly hide the stems for any notes, measures, systems, or ranges that don’t need stems.
Quick and easy!
BONUS: If you’re writing music for handbells and are having issues with stems in the Bells Used chart, this is a quick fix for that also.




Na







