1988, among other things, forever decided the fate of all these ridiculous sticks and hooks, which were used for writing musical notes and other elements accompanying them for a long time. From now on, no dirty fingers and nerves in the case of a wrong stroke. And all this thanks to the inquisitive mind of the American programmer Phil Farrand. It was he who first created a special computer program for music notation – Finale, designed to permanently relieve the long-suffering compositors from all their uneasy existence in one fell swoop.
The first version was named, for some reason, Finale-1.0. Subsequent versions were called in the same way, accompanied by a suitable sequence number. And only after the version of Finale-3.7, someone from the developers had the fateful idea to name the new versions of the program according to the year of their release. It happened in 1997, and since then we have such wonderful names, our own for each year.
Music notation on Finale is made through interaction with special instruments, represented by numerous icons on the screen. The action is performed mostly by entering the necessary information in the right place. This may seem inconvenient for a novice user, but in fact this is a fairly reliable way of capturing an image, which eliminates its accidental distortion. And if you are inclined from time to time to accidentally hook on anything, but music copying on Finale will not allow you to do this and everything already typed will not be distorted or corrupted in any way.
Finale will allow you to type musical text, as well as any letter text; if necessary, make the necessary changes to the already typed; move its parts in any random order; produce formatting and, of course, print.
In addition, music notation on Finale will allow the reproduction of the typed musical text, which, due to the technical complexity of the performed musical material, will exceed the capabilities of any recognized virtuoso performer. Each musical instrument will sound its own timbre, and the tone and tempo of the performance can be changed in the course of playback.
In short, how else can music notation on Finale surprise us:
by creating your own score, while the program automatically creates separate note stanas for each instrument, with the necessary key marks for the transposing instruments;
representation of the score in a linear or page image, while the page image will correspond to the image that you see on paper if you decide to print it;
change in size and pitch, even for individual instruments;
in various ways of typing musical notation — music copying on Finale using a mouse, using a computer keyboard or using a MIDI keyboard is entirely at your discretion;
the introduction of subscript or superscript in vocal parts;
export and import of graphic files;
and, finally, fast and convenient extraction of batches of any selected instruments from the already typed musical text.
This list is far from exhausted, but it also gives a good idea of the unique capabilities of the computer universe of music notation on Finale. The results of these opportunities today are widely used in professional music for film, television and theater, as well as in publishing institutions around the world.