Tutorial 3: Auditioning your score

Listening to your music to check for mistakes.

Finale’s playback feature gives you the opportunity to hear your music as you write it. This way, you can easily check for mistakes.

By the end of this lesson, you will know how to:

1. Use the Playback Controls
2. Spot check your music
3. Queue playback at any measure

To begin at this point, open tutorial document Tutorial 3.MUSX. How? This tutorial explores playback options without making any changes to the document itself. If you don't care to use Finale's playback features, skip ahead to Tutorial 4.

The Playback Controls

The Playback Controls give you standard buttons for controlling the playback of your score.

Playback Controls – What it Does:

Use the Play and Stop buttons to start and stop playback. As you play back your music, you will probably find that you want to adjust the tempo. The most convenient ways to do this are with the tempo controls or with tempo markings.

Tempo Control – What it Does:

The Tempo drop down can be used to change the note duration for your playback. Enter the metronome marking in the adjacent text box.

Since there’s no tempo marking in this score, and the default marking will probably be a little fast, you can adjust the tempo and play back what you’ve just written.

To specify the playback tempo

1. Click in the Tempo text box.
2. Delete the metronome marking that appears there.
3. Type 86.
4. Click the Play button . By default, Finale starts playing your score from the beginning.
5. Click the Stop button when all the music has been played.

Audio spot checking ("scrubbing playback")

In many cases, you may want to spot-check parts of your score rather than listen to the whole thing from beginning to end.

To audio spot check:

1. Place your cursor over beat 1 of measure 11.
2. Hold down CTRL+SPACEBAR to hear Finale play that beat.
3. Hold down CTRL+SPACEBAR and move your cursor horizontally to hear the music you are dragging over at your own pace.
4. Type CTRL+SHIFT+SPACEBAR to isolate a single staff.
5. Move your cursor from between the staves to hear each line individually.

Queuing Playback

You can quickly start playback from any point in the score using a keyboard shortcut.

To queue playback:

1. Hold down the SPACEBAR.
2. Click on measure 8 to start playback.
3. Click anywhere outside the staff to stop playback.

Note: Triggering playback in this way bypasses Human Playback, ignoring all the nuances of articulations and expressions.

To control the playback area, including dynamics and articulations:

1. Click the Playback Settings button . The Playback Settings dialog box appears.

Playback Settings – What it does:

You can choose three starting points for your playback: A specific measure (measure 1 by default, however you can specify any measure you choose), the leftmost measure (particularly useful when using Scroll View, since Finale will start playing at the measure on the left hand side of the screen), or current counter setting, which will activate the counter controls on the Playback Controls.

2. Under Playback Region, select Leftmost Measure.
3. Choose View > Scroll View.
4. Now scroll to measure 8, so that measure 8 is the leftmost measure on the screen. “8” will appear in the measure counter at the bottom of your screen.
5. Click the Play button .
6. Click the Stop button when you’re done listening.

Note: If a tempo marking is present in your score, Finale will play back at the tempo indicated and override the tempo in the Playback Controls (see Tempo Marks for more information).

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