How to Copy and Paste Lyrics in Finale How to Look Back on Wasted Time
I’ve been using the music notation program Finale for sixteen years. I’d like to think that I’m somewhat of an expert on its features, but it’s taken me a very long time to get to that point.
When I first started using it as a middle school student with the bare minimum of music theory knowledge, and even less music engraving know-how, I was a point-and-click composer. I exclusively used my mouse to first click what rhythmic value I wanted, then click on the staff where I wanted the note to appear for every single note of the piece I was writing. I’d do the same thing to add sharps, flats, naturals, ties, triplets, and rests.
This tedious method was how I composed all throughout middle school, high school, and even into college:
When I finally enrolled in a Music Technology course at Belmont University, our professor showed us the Speedy Entry tool, which allows you to spend a fraction of that time merely playing the music on a MIDI controller and pressing a number key for rhythmic value: 5 for quarter note, 4 for eighth note, 3 for sixteenth, etc.
When I used this tool for the first time, I felt a mixture of incredible relief and debilitating frustration.
- “This is amazing! I’ll be able to write music so much faster now!”
- “Wait…I’ve been writing music for years in the most inefficient way possible, and I didn’t figure it out until just now.”
The ghosts of all the wasted hours I’d spent manually clicking the eighth note button floated in front of me like Jacob Marley, tokens of my shame.
I remembered this experience recently, because after using Finale for more than half of my nearly 30 years of life, I’ve now discovered that it’s possible to copy and paste lyrics from one staff to another. Get a load of this nonsense:
This Edit Filter checkbox has basically eliminated the most tedious part of arranging for a cappella groups. Many arrangers just skip it all together using this great cop-out:
- da da da da (etc.)
I stopped doing that myself once I realized how lazy it looked, and now, looking back on all of the hours I spent endlessly typing out “doo (space) doo (space) doo (space, space over the rest) doo (space) doo” make me feel a bit silly. Of course, I’m still not out of the woods yet; this new method only really works when the music is homophonic, or at least follows the same rhythmic pattern from line to line. Still, it saved me quite a bit of time in finishing up my most recent arranging project, and I can’t wait to work it into my routine.
This process of learning new ways of doing the same thing is inextricable with mastering any craft. While I’m frustrated that I could have done things more efficiently for years, I can also choose to look at it this way: that was the way I had to do it to be able to learn how to do it well.
Many composers look at their early works with embarrassment, and I certainly do at times…Why did I use G-flats in D major? But I also look on my first piece ever written with a bit of pride. “Song of Water” (yes, I did play Zelda as a child) was an initial, very earnest attempt to create something beautiful, despite barely having any knowledge of notation or how harmony really worked. I had a melody in my heart and I needed to write it down, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to write it using the Speedy Entry tool.
I’m taking piano lessons from my wife after not receiving any formal instruction since college. She has almost as much experience teaching piano as I do using Finale, and she’s really good at it; that first lesson allowed me to see that practiced expertise in a way that I’d never seen from her before. It also made me aware that my skills have slipped considerably, and I have to relearn the fundamentals. The repertoire she’s assigned to me would have been insultingly easy a few years ago…and yet, I’m struggling to practice the correct fingering, keep making note mistakes, and have to keep trying at slower and slower paces to get it right.
With piano, I’m determined to do it right the first time.
