My last blog discussed how you can use quantization to speed up note entry and reduce subsequent editing. Today I offer another tip to help clean up any music entered in real-time – whether you’re playing notes directly into Finale or importing MIDI files.

Here is a piece I played into Finale:

For this example, I quantized to a 16^th note and purposely lifted my fingers early to demonstrate a common way in which what we play can differ from what we intend to play. As you can see, many pitches are expressed as a 16^th note followed by a 16^th rest.

Now for the fun part: Tobias Giesen’s great plug-in called “Modify Rests,’ included free with Finale. This plug-in offers many options to alter the appearance and duration of rests. I’ll use it here to extend the duration of some of the shorter notes above to reduce rests:

1. Choose the Selection Tool and highlight the music you want to clean up.
2. Select Plug-ins > TGTools > Modify Rests.
3. This dialog box will appear. Select the Simplify tab and check all four boxes:
4. Click “OK” and the music above gets instantly “cleaned up” to look like this:

While the results are similar to what we would have gotten had we quantized to 8^th notes, we preserved some 16^th notes in the process, so I welcome this approach as an additional option.

Along with the concepts of quantization and re-transcribe, I hope the Modify Rests plug-in will greatly improve your real-time note entry. Enjoy!