More on Speedy Entry

Combining the speed of Speedy Entry with the convenience of Selection Tool copying, as you’ve just done, is a quick, accurate method of entering music—especially with practice.

Eventually you’ll discover even more shortcuts: for example, to enter several repeated notes, just hold the MIDI keyboard key down continuously while you repeatedly press the rhythmic-value keys (you don’t have to restrike the MIDI keyboard key each time).

As mentioned earlier, you can do the opposite, too. You can tell Finale that all the notes you’re about to play are sixteenth notes, and then simply play them, as slowly as you wish, on your MIDI instrument; Finale will enter them into the score. You can press Caps Lock to activate this feature. For instructions, see Speedy Entry—To enter many notes of the same value.

Music only gets entered when you press a rhythmic-value key, so feel free to play your MIDI keyboard as much as you like, without fear that you’ll inadvertently throw notes onto the screen. Chords are a breeze, too: just hold down MIDI keyboard keys for the notes in the chord before you press the rhythmic-value key.

You can drag any note of a chord up or down to change its pitch, just as you did with a single note earlier in the tutorial. If you double-click and, on the second click, hold the button down, you can drag an entire chord up and down the staff (instead of dragging one note at a time). And don’t forget that you can also drag any note or chord horizontally. If you want to drag a note only vertically or only horizontally, press while you drag—your cursor will be “constrained” to perfectly vertical or horizontal movements.

Take another look at the Speedy Entry Keyboard Commands diagrams that appear earlier in this tutorial, and you’ll learn about some other features of Speedy Entry. For example, if you position the insertion bar on the second of two notes that are beamed together, pressing the slash key (/) will break the beam; pressing it again will rejoin the beam. There’s also a key that turns any note into a grace note (and back again)—the semicolon (;).

Pressing the t key (lower case letter t) ties a note to the next note. -equal (Mac: -equal) ties a note to the previous note. You can tie all notes of a chord at once by positioning the crossbar on the chord stem, and not on any notehead. And, if you’re working on a score with several staves, pressing -down arrow (Mac: ) moves the editing frame down to the next lower staff; pressing -up arrow (Mac: -) moves it back up.

Finally, if you ever want to hide an entry (a note or rest), just position the insertion bar on it and press the letter h key; the entry appears lightly in the score (if Show Hidden Notes and Rests is checked under the View menu), and will not print. Also, when you begin working with Finale’s four transparent staff layers (called Layer 1 through 4), you can flip through the layers by pressing -’ (apostrophe) (Mac: -down arrow or -up arrow). Within each layer, you can have two independently-stemmed voices (called Voice 1 and Voice 2). The apostrophe (’) key switches between one voice and the other.

There’s no need to learn all of these key commands now. But it might be useful for you to keep the Speedy Entry Keyboard Commands diagram handy.

If you ever add too many augmentation dots, press the appropriate number key to return the note to the original duration.

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