This technique is especially useful for
Shape Note Music, where the shape of a note indicates its pitch, and for
drum parts, where you might want all notes on the spaces of the staff
to have X noteheads (cymbals and hi-hat), but all notes on lines of the
staff to have normal noteheads (tom-toms and bass drum).
You can assign a different notehead shape to each step
of the scale.
- Click the Staff tool
; then double-click the staff in question. The
Staff Attributes dialog box appears for the staff you clicked. You grant
permission for changeable note shapes one staff at a time.
- Choose Independent Elements >
Notehead font; then click Select. The Font dialog box appears.
- Select the font, and size of the Notehead you
want to use, then click OK. For Shape Note music or percussion
noteheads, use Maestro Percussion or JazzPerc.
- Click OK to dismiss the Staff Attributes.
- Click on the Settings button next to Use Note Shapes. The Note Shapes options appear.
- From the drop-down
menu, choose the first notehead shape you want
to change. The four basic note shapes in Finale are the quarter
notehead
(also used by eighth, sixteenth, and smaller
note values), the half notehead 
, the whole notehead
, and the double whole note
. For each
note of the scale, you can specify an alternate notehead shape (X, diamond,
and so on) for each of these four basic shapes. For example, you could
specify that every half note occurring on the third scale degree will
appear as an X notehead. See Shape
Note music for a chart of note shapes and scale degrees.
- Specify the scale degree for which you want
to modify the selected notehead. Enter the scale degree into the
“scale degree” text box, or click the UP and DOWN ARROW until the scale
degree number is the one you want.
- Click Select. The Symbol Selection dialog
box appears, displaying every character in the music font.
- Double-click the symbol you want to serve as
the alternate notehead shape. You can continue this way, using
the arrow buttons to move through the scale degrees, and clicking Select
to choose a new notehead shape.
- Click OK twice to return to the score. You return to the document,
where the noteheads of the type and scale degree you specified have automatically
changed to the alternate note shapes you selected. If you anticipate creating
other scores with the same configuration, save this piece on your disk
as a template (a blank document without any notes in it), so that you
won’t have to repeat the process the next time you need to create alternate
note shapes.
