The above, my esteemed blog readers, is Finale 1.0, from 1988. Folks trying to sell other music notation software would like you to remember Finale 1.0 when comparing benefits with their 2011 offerings.

While even the earliest versions of Finale were extremely flexible and capable of producing incredible results, they were admittedly more than a little cryptic at times. Can you name the tool icons pictured above? Whoever can correctly identify the most – before the end of April – wins a Finale t-shirt. But here’s the catch: it’s a closed book test – you can only use your memory – and you’re on your honor! (In the event of a tie, we'll randomly select a winner.)

Finale has come a long way since 1988. In regard to tools specifically, there are fewer tools, the need to switch tools has been greatly reduced, and the tool icons are quite a bit more intuitive.

Here’s what Finale 2011’s tool palette looks like on my Windows laptop:

While this looks like home to most of you, did you know you can easily change the look of your tool palette? You can customize the appearance of Finale by choosing from several palette styles, including one, “Traditional,” that mimics the “vintage” look of Finale 1.0.

Here’s where you go to do so:

Windows: Edit > Program Options > Palettes and Backgrounds
Macintosh:  Finale 2011 > Preferences > Program Options > Palettes and Backgrounds

Enter our contest, share a Finale story, or ask a Finale question by clicking on “Comments” below.

Petrucci, Engraver, and Maestro, three of the many music fonts included with Finale.

Most of us have changed the look of a word processing document by switching text fonts, say from Times to Arial. Have you similarly tried switching music fonts in Finale? While it can be dramatic to switch from a font with a handwritten appearance, like Broadway Copyist, to a font with an engraved look, like Maestro, there are many more subtle options available as well.

Take for instance the three examples above. In each the notehead, rests, clef, and time signature are slightly different. To some these small variations are very important.

Back in the 1990s, the Music Publishers Association (MPA) contacted MakeMusic (then Coda Music Technology) about Petrucci (show at left above), which was then the default music font in Finale. Because Finale had become, in their opinion, the standard in music notation software, they wanted to express their concern about Petrucci’s appearance, which they regarded as “anemic.”

Thus began a wonderful partnership in which none other than Arnold Broido helped us to develop “the ultimate music notation font.” Mr. Broido was the real deal. During his career he had served as the president of the MPA, ASCAP, and (music publishing company) Theodore Presser. Thanks to NAMM’s Oral History project, you can see and hear Arnold speak here.

I remember seeing drawings of the collaborative music font in progress (blueprints really) with degree angles indicating intricate specifications. Notehead sizes were also painstakingly specified. In fact everything, from eighth-note flags to bass clef thicknesses, was laid out in precise detail. I fondly remember many lunches with Bruce Nelson, the Los Angeles font developer we employed to actually make the MPA’s vision a reality within Finale.

The resulting font was named “Engraver,” which replaced Petrucci as Finale’s default music font. It appears as the middle font above, and you can see how its noteheads were much more robust than those in Petrucci. Alas, like many “ultimate” things, it too was eventually replaced in turn by Maestro, the third font above. Petrucci, Engraver, and a Maestro variation, “Maestro Wide” are all still available to Finale users, and Engraver remains popular with certain publishers.

Personally, my favorite music fonts are those with more oval noteheads, like Finale’s Maestro Wide font. You can see examples of Maestro Wide and the fonts included free with Finale here. While to some the differences between these fonts may seem very subtle, “subtle” is one of the many things Finale does exceedingly well!

Interested in purchasing additional fonts? You might check out Adobe’s Sonata, which is still in use despite preceding even Petrucci, and Robert Piéchaud’s elegant and warm “November” which is very popular with European publishers.

Not sure how to switch fonts in Finale? From Finale’s Document menu, simply choose “Set Default Music Font…”

We’d love to hear about your experiments in music fonts, or any questions you might have. Please share them by clicking on “Comments” below.

Like any written language, music notation continually evolves. In October 1974 more than eighty musicians, representing seventeen countries, met in Ghent, Belgium to discuss this evolution.

The event, titled the International Conference on New Music Notation, proposed to standardize notational signs and procedures, preferably building on tradition, that allowed immediate recognition (presumably across language barriers), could retain intelligibility when rendered inexpertly by hand, made efficient use of space, and so on.

The conference produced a report that listed all approved signs, which was published in Interface—Journal of New Music Research, in November 1975.

One notational device that offers immediate recognition, regardless of language, is the use of icons to represent various percussion instruments in a score, and such icons were part of this publication. In the intervening years, many of the symbols suggested by the conference have come into widespread use by music publishers.

In creating a new percussion font for Finale 2011, MakeMusic’s Mark Adler set out to provide the most complete collection of this type of percussion character. Here are some examples from the resulting Finale Percussion font:

Some characters are unique to the Finale Percussion font, including castanets, vibraslap, and cannon. In addition the font (which is included with Finale 2011) provides handbell and mallet symbols as well as repeatable characters ala sine waves, scribbles, and more.

Now for today’s tip: A complete list of all of the characters in the font, the keystrokes required to access them, and a brief description of what they depict can be found in the Finale user manual. Here’s a link to that information, presented for both Macintosh and Windows users. 

In perusing these character maps, you can see a few cases where two different icons represent the same item; this occurs when Mark felt that neither icon had become universally accepted -- of course the evolution continues.

In an upcoming post we’ll learn more about Mark Adler, his role at MakeMusic, and his creations.

Are you using the Finale Percussion font in your work? Please share your experiences by clicking on “Comments” below.

Bibliography: Stone, Kurt.  Music Notation in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980.

For many people, it's hard to imagine life without technology that none of us had just a few years ago. Personally I could get along without cell phones, lap tops, and compact discs while I'd sorely miss home video.

But life before Finale? That would be really tough. For some, here's what that life looked like:

For decades, if you wanted to create your own, engraved-looking sheet music, the MusicWriter was your state-of-the-art option. Of course it didn’t play your music back, the slightest misstep required the use of correction fluid, and if you decided to insert a new measure in the first system, you started over. But the MusicWriter offered the promise of a page that looked better than my scribbling.

Here’s a close-up of the user interface:

According to the History of Music Printing website, the MusicWriter was invented by Cecil Effinger, a noted choral composer and music professor who created his first prototype in 1946. His company, Music Print Corporation, worked with various manufacturers (including Olympia and Smith Corona, the creators of this particular model) to produce more than 5,000 MusicWriters from 1956 to 1990.

The keyboard was used to put musical characters on any page. You could work on manuscript paper or use the MusicWriter to create even the staff lines. Unlike a typewriter, the MusicWriter carriage does not advance after striking a key: the user has to very carefully position the paper wherever they want to add any character. Many items, including slurs, ties, and beams had to be drawn by hand. Details of how music was created with the MusicWriter can be seen here.

While ingenious for its time, the MusicWriter didn't handle transpositions, apply music spacing, or do any of the countless things we take for granted with software today — even in the $10 Finale NotePad. A Boulder History Museum webpage acknowledges this disparity: “Unfortunately, due to the advent of computers, MusicWriters quickly became obsolete.”

Some might debate whether it was the computer or specific software that was the leading cause of the MusicWriter’s departure. Personally, I lean towards the computer theory, if for no other reason than this: If software is the culprit, I’m a partner in crime, as no company has sold more music notation software than MakeMusic, my employer since 1993!

That said, I don’t feel particularly guilt-ridden about my role as potential accomplice. While I will occasionally spin an LP and appreciate the benefits it offers, I’ve yet to borrow coworker Mark Adler’s MusicWriter: Nostalgia doesn’t draw my beams for me – let alone provide me with linked parts.

PS: Click here to check out the next generation of music notation: the MusicWriter II!

Steve Peha, creator of Petrucci, Finale's first music notation font — Photo by Margot Carmichael Lester

Recently I was asked on Facebook about the origin of Petrucci, the music font used by early versions of Finale. While I know a little bit about Phil Farrand and the origin of Finale (and plan to blog about this soon), I realized I knew nothing of the origin of Petrucci. Although I've been with MakeMusic since 1993, I had to ask a few of the folks who've been here even longer before I learned that the name of the font's creator; Steve Peha. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet I was able to find Steve and was delightfully surprised not only at Steve's generosity in sharing his recollections, but also by the detail of his memories of events that occurred over twenty years ago:

"The font was created much like any other, I suppose. At an early point in Finale's development, Coda realized that relying solely on the Adobe Sonata font was not a good long-term strategy. For one thing, it didn't have nearly enough symbols in it. For another, Phil Farrand, the original programmer, had to practically stand on his head to get things like flags to line up correctly. You should have seen all the 'secret' parameters and 'offsets' that were required to make Sonata work. It worked, but it was obvious that Adobe had no intention of improving it, and that Finale's future development might be slightly encumbered as a result.

I was working on the early documentation at the time with Jim Romeo of Romeo Music and his business partner, and fellow musician, George Litterst. The need for a font arose and as I was fairly competent in the graphic arts, I got the gig.

I had to create the font very quickly. I think I did it in about eight weeks. By contrast, I believe that Cleo Huggins, Adobe's designer on Sonata, had about six months to work with. Petrucci had more than twice the number of useable symbols. At the time, it represented the largest music symbol selection available for a desktop computer.

While the Sonata font was based on the traditional Letraset press-on music symbol set, Petrucci is not strictly-speaking based on anything. I had always appreciated the look of the famous Peters piano editions. I liked the old-style look for classical music. But Finale would, of course, be used for all kinds of music, so something that traditional wouldn't have been appropriate.

Ultimately, Petrucci struck me as something of a hybrid: not 'new' like Sonata, not 'old' like Peters. To be honest, my skills were not sharp enough to truly capture another type foundry's design. Petrucci bears little resemblance to Sonata. Among other things, Sonata is considerably smoother. My ability to place "control points" back then was not what it is today. There's still a little 'hump' on the treble clef that I use to detect Petrucci whenever I see printed music. I must have worked 20 hours to get that hump smoothed out, but I never quite got it right. Other symbols also have unintended irregularities. I guess you could say they add character, no pun intended. In truth, I was in over my head. Petrucci was the first font I ever worked on and I just hoped it would be good enough to get Finale off to a good start. I think it succeeded but I'm also glad that Finale's font selection has improved right along with improvements in the program itself.

I finished the font several months before Finale 1.0 was released. It had to be done this way because Phil needed to tune the placement of symbols under a variety of different circumstances. It took many, many printouts to get everything right, and at certain points, he asked me to make small adjustments to certain symbols, usually to move them up or down by a fraction of a point or so.

The font existed for several months without a name. We had just assumed that it would be called 'The Finale Font' or that Coda would choose a name. But as the program neared release, no name seemed forthcoming. So Jim and I were sitting around thinking about what to call it and we thought about how Aldus had gotten its name from Aldus Manutius, the great printer. So Jim and I tried to figure out who the first printer or publisher was to set music using moveable type. That turned out to be Ottaviano Petrucci. And that's how the font got its name.

Over the years, so many wonderful music fonts have been created that I really think Petrucci is a little 'long in the tooth.' As I said, I was not a great designer at the time, nor did I know much about the subtleties of symbol font design. Up to that point, I had only worked with text fonts and only as a self-schooled graphic artist and desktop publisher. Turns out there are just as many concepts to music font design -- they're just all different.

At the MacWorld Boston release of Finale, I was accosted by this Finnish gentleman who proceeded to give me several long lessons in music font design. This amounted to a litany of things I'd done wrong. However, as the fellow finally conceded, Petrucci was the best font available for a desktop computer program and in that sense he judged it to be at least moderately successful. But he hoped that I would 'fix' it as soon as possible and that I would continue to rev it at least once each year. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Personally, I love the way Finale ships now with so many font choices. As a former jazz arranger, I'm partial to handwritten fonts and I was really excited when those became available. 'Charts' done in Petrucci always drew snickers from the horn players.

The time I spent working on Finale was one of the most exciting periods of my life. And getting the opportunity to create the Petrucci font still stands out as one of the coolest projects I've ever participated in. It's impossible to convey now what Finale represented back then. For years, musicians the world over had struggled to publish music on their computers. But no single program existed that could handle the demands of professional music publishing. I first saw Finale two years before it shipped: I think only two or three tools were functional at the time. But I completely freaked out when, after a few 8th notes in a bar, it automatically respaced them to be more readable. A modest accomplishment to say the least, and yet it totally blew me away. That's how earth-shattering seemed to all of us at the time."

After creating Petrucci, Steve hung up his Bezier curves - he considers himself permanently retired from font design. Since then he has enjoyed a diverse career as a software developer, high-tech entrepreneur, and more. Today Steve is the president of Teaching That Makes Sense (TTMS), an education consultancy specializing in literacy, assessment, and educational leadership.

For some time, I've wanted to learn to use a sextant. I'm not a real sailor; I don't have any real practical application for it, but I'm often intrigued by the old ways of doing things. I prefer to play old guitars through tube amplifiers, I share my a bit of dad's interests in vintage cars and film cameras, and I am drawn to all matter of anachronistic hardware.

Similarly I am fascinated by thought of how sheet music was made before Finale. Well, I know I how I made it - with a pencil or pen, and sometimes with scissors and tape or glue. But I'm thinking of how music was engraved. If you've never seen Anneliese Bente's 1997 "Sharp as a Tack" video, about how G. Henle used to create their Urtext editions, check it out at:

http://www.henle.de/katalog/stichmaterial.cfm

You may notice on the same page that G. Henle also offers their old engraving plates for sale through their dealers. This fact was actually the impetus for today's blog - one of my coworkers brought one of these plates to work:

Holding this plate in my hands I marvel at the craftsmanship involved in using Iron Age tools to create such a work of art. If mastering the chisel wasn't enough, keep in mind you had to do it all in reverse. It's a bit humbling.

I'm reminded of my own pre-computer struggles with a typewriter in an effort to produce even a few perfect pages of text; not a particularly fond nor nostalgic memory. While I may have admiration for some aspects of the past, I'm not interested in giving up my computer for a typewriter and some chisels. (Have I mentioned my dependence on spell-checking software?)

But the plate, like the resulting engraving, is beautiful. Are you interested in owning one? More details are available at: http://www.jwpepper.com/10061175.item

Am I buying one? Well, no. I'm saving up for a sextant. And a vintage tube strobe tuner.