Finale brings together a rich feature set that includes a professional sound library, all imaginable kinds of music notation options and excellent recording and editing capabilities. When combined with educational tools such as ear-training lessons, theory worksheets and a free reader app for students, Finale is our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner.
In classical music and live performances, the finale is the last movement in a symphony, opera or concerto. It's the composer's chance to show off, to reintroduce the best melodies and weave them together into a conclusive whole. Great examples of this include the majestic Hallelujah chorus by George Frederic Handel and the hauntingly beautiful conclusion of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, complete with augmented fourths and five-beat measures.
The long history of the finale might be why developers at MakeMusic Inc. chose the Italian word as the name of its premium music notation software. You can use this unparalleled application to create practically any kind of music, including a clarinet concerto accompanied by a full orchestra, lead sheets for jazz musicians or individualized études for your neighborhood piano students. Finale is the best of a family of music notation software. Options with fewer composition tools and a smaller price tag include Finale Allegro, Finale PrintMusic, Finale SongWriter, Finale NotePad and the free Finale Reader.
Finale notation software has all the tools you need to create beautiful tunes, whether you're a rhythm-and-blues guitarist who plays by ear, a college professor with decades of classical training or a Nashville producer fine-tuning the pop songs that will play over the airwaves.
Perhaps your internal drumbeat is a little more Metallica and a little less Beethoven. All you need to do to create a song in Finale is connect your MIDI instrument to your Mac or PC, select the proper entry mode in the application and start fingering and strumming. When you're finished, you can play back the recorded sounds and compare them to the tabulation or notation on your screen. That way, you can make sure that all the chords, strum markings and melodies are perfect. From there, you can publish your music online or send your digital recordings to friends, family or fellow band members. You can even use Finale to change the key up or down by a few notes to accommodate a singer's vocal range.
As a music-education professional, you can create complete orchestral scores with Finale, starting in the set-up wizard. There, you can select all the instruments you want, in addition to the time and key signatures and title information. Then, you can enter notes using any MIDI instrument or the mouse and keyboard attached to your computer. Finale automatically configures your MIDI device, even if you switch between instruments as you compose.
You can listen to the melodies and harmonies as you go along and can easily transpose a melodic line or chord progression from key to key or from one instrument to another. Choose among the 375 instrument sounds of the Garritan Personal Orchestra to give voice to your masterpiece, or from included libraries such as Tapspace Virtual Drumline and Authorized Steinway sounds. The premium version of Finale will also play dynamics, expression cues and tempo markings. This exciting feature saves you time, money and hassle because you can aurally check your work long before live musicians get the chance to sight-read it. Handel would be green with envy.
The 2012 edition of Finale will automatically associate the instruments you write parts for with the appropriate MIDI tracks for those instruments. You can even choose external sound libraries and Finale will remember your selections the next time you use the application.
Another feature new to Finale 2012 is the ScoreManager tool. It replaces the File Info dialog box and lets you add and remove instruments easily while simultaneously choosing their MIDI playback tracks.
Finale stuffed so many features into this application that you might never use or understand all of them. In addition to the composing tools discussed above, you can scan sheet music into Finale and use any melody to create variations or write a duet part. Furthermore, Finale has plug-ins that will create a harmonic accompaniment for any melody you write, add harmonies as you perform, find common composing mistakes and even perform chord analysis. If you don't want classical notation but want control over loudness and tempo, you can use the sound mixer tool to get your audio file just right.
Finale music notation software is far ahead of the competition because of its educational tools, which include ear-training exercises, composition worksheets, improvisation exercises and a database of classical music scores. Use the ear-training modules to learn how solfege intervals sound (do, re, mi and so forth). You can also practice melodic and chord dictation by ear there. Use composition worksheets to practice theory and browse through more than 100 public domain titles in the repertoire library for the perfect example of form and analysis for a class. Use lead sheets to assign improvisation exercises to private students and note flashcards to teach the basics to beginning students.
Another way the Finale family of music software helps educators is by offering a free digital reader and special academic pricing. Finale's weak link in terms of educational tools is that it lacks the ability to let one teacher control a roomful of students' computers. Other leading music notation software applications recently introduced this capability.
Finale music notation software can do everything short of writing your melodies for you. Its MIDI instrument options let you use a keyboard, guitar or microphone to enter notes. You can also input data using your computer keyboard and mouse or by clicking on a virtual guitar fretboard. You can't input notes using a virtual keyboard.
You can spread your music as an audio file, a standard MIDI file, an XML file or a PDF file. If you're writing a book or preparing a class, you can also export your Finale music as a graphic to insert into a text document or multimedia presentation. You can also print your creation on paper or share it with the world by posting it online.
Some of Finale's best features are hard to find and hard to use, but the application's overall usability is tough to criticize when you take into account how many functions it has. Fortunately, a free user guide is available online. You can search it by keyword or read it chapter by chapter like you would a book. Be sure to take advantage of the free video tutorials. Complete each exercise and you will know the software application inside and out.
If you would rather figure out Finale on your own, be warned that the learning curve is a steep one. It is difficult to select individual notes and bars in Finale, for example. We also found it nearly impossible to input dynamic markings. We struggled with the chord realization plug-in and the band-in-a-box auto-harmonizing feature, for example.
Finale's free online user guide is the best we found among premier music notation applications. You can also contact Finale by phone or email, and you can browse user forums for answers to your most difficult notation questions.
Finale is the best music notation application on the market today. It combines superior input and editing functions with great recording and mixing capability, making it a great choice for professional musicians. Its fully stocked feature set is also great for music educators and college students learning the ins and outs of solfege, music theory, form and analysis, and melody composition. Finale software will increase your level of musicianship, whether you're the next Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the next Paul McCartney or a self-made mix master extraordinaire.
