Customer Reviews

The Finale Primer: Mastering the Art of Music Notation with Finale

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I began to read with great anticipation but was sorely disappointed. There were too many errors in the 2000 edition, which apparently had been revised in a hurry to catch up with the software upgrade. Many of the existing shortcuts were either inaccurate or, in the case of the new ones, omitted altogether. The author also geared much of his commentary towards Mac users and referred all unexplained problems back to the Final Manual. Very sketchy - and I still have not figured out how to set up the percussion so it sounds like the instruments I want. A complete waste of money.

This book spends too much time explaing computer operation (pull down menus, command keys) and not enough on Finale. Too often as it gets close to having some depth it says "but this is beyond the scope of this book, read your Finale manual." The one page index is worthless. The book does things like wastes 4 pages on a windows/mac keyboard comparison chart and yet does not show how to setup notating a drum kit. If this is your first piece of software, maybe it would be helpful, but if you think it gives insight and tricks beyond your manual, forget it. I feel cheated. I found some mistakes in the book and certainly the title "mastering" is an overstatement.

As a teacher of electronic music and a Finale user since 1992, I have been looking for a good, well-written and reasonably priced text on Finale for my students, other than the online documentation (which is actually not so bad in of itself). This book contains some OK beginning exercises for students, but is not what I would expect in a quality textbook on Finale, and for a semester long course in music notation, you run out of topics rather quickly. Particularly, there is no addressing the more powerful aspects of Finale, including the versitale MIDI tool, among other advanced features. I flipped through the Rudolph/Leonard book from Berklee Press briefly, and that looked much more promising, but it is considerably more expensive. Granted, the title of the book does say "Primer", but at the same time, the concept of "Mastering" falls way short with this book.

I bought this as a college textbook and couldn't survive the class without it. It's very easy to understand, and Finale is by far the most user-friendly and versatle music notation program...I just wish it weren't so expensive.