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Explode Music dialog box

How to get there

  1. Click the Selection tool , and select a region of measures.
  2. Choose Utilities > Explode Music.

You can also use a Selection tool Metatool: press the 2 key with selected measures. Or, hold down E while dragging selected measures to a destination.

What it does

In essence, Finale’s Explode Music command strips a chordal passage into individual single-line melodies on separate staves. You could use this feature, for example, to transform a piano reduction into four single-line melody staves for a choir.

Before it will "explode" the selected region, however, you have to tell Finale, in this dialog box, how many resultant staves you want, what clefs they should use, and how Finale should handle cases where there are more notes (or fewer notes) in a chord than there are staves on which the music will be exploded.

When Distribute to These Staves __ is selected, it allows you to decide, explicitly, which staves will receive extra notes. For example, if you’re exploding the music from a chordal passage into three staves, and one of the chords contains five notes, this box decides which staves are allowed to receive more than one note of the chord, therefore, guaranteeing all the notes in the chord will be present in one of the resulting staves.

In the example above, if you left the default numbers in this box (12340000), Finale would recalculate how the notes are to be distributed from the original five-note chord, allowing more than one note from the chord to appear in staff one and staff two. That is, it would notate the top two notes on the first exploded staff, the next two on the second staff, and the fifth (bottom) note on the third exploded staff. If the Distribute to These Staves was 22222222, however, Finale would place all the "extra" notes (the top three of the original five-note chord) on the second exploded staff; the remaining staves would receive one note apiece.

Tip: The Numbers beside Clef refer to Finale’s numbering. 0=Treble Clef; 3=Bass Clef

 

Note: If you place the music into existing staves, the music in the selected region for those staves will be lost.

 

See also:

Selection tool

 

 

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Finale 2014 for Windows

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