Finale 2011 included three new music fonts. While previous blogs have briefly touched upon the Finale AlphaNotes and Finale Percussion fonts, this week I’d like to focus on the Finale Mallets font. Some examples of the font appear below:
The Finale Mallets font includes icons to represent any variety of mallet usages, including the ability to create cross-mallet symbols as seen on left side of the second row above. Here two overlapping mallet characters are combined to indicate that the performer should use different types of mallets in each hand.
Today I’d like to share how you might go about creating such an example:
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Select Finale’s Expression tool and double-click where you’d like the mallet image to appear.
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Select “Miscellaneous Text” then click “Create Misc. Text…”
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Next to “Font” specify “Finale Mallets,” 24 point size, and specify a Rectangle Enclosure (it’s an option, but common practice), then type 9&+9&
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Click “OK” and “Assign” and you’re done!
Did everything make sense but the 9&+9&?
To learn which keystrokes are associated with which characters, check out the handy Finale Mallets font character maps, provided for both Windows and Macintosh users (you can also find these in Finale’s User Manual). Note that the characters that require the use of a shift-key are typically zero-width characters. This means they’ll overlap the previous character, which is exactly what we want them to do today. The results of the steps above can be seen in the example below:
This example was provided by Mark Adler, who also created the Finale Mallets font. I’ll share more information about Mark and some of his other Finale contributions next week.
Have a question about the Finale Mallets font, or anything else in Finale? Let us know by clicking on “Comments” before.