
Though these can be incredibly helpful, we will instead create our own percussion layout since we only need a couple of instruments. Welcome to the Percussion Layout Selection dialog box: As you see, many preset percussion layouts are available here. Under the Instrument List tab, select the Percussion staff and click the Settings button near the Notation Style pop-up menu. Here is the list of instruments we will use as seen in Finale’s Setup Wizard: Once the document is set up, open the Score Manager: Also, please excuse the strange colors seen in these screenshots I take full advantage of Finale’s ability to accommodate color-impaired users. Note that you can click on the images below for a closer look. Don’t be deterred by all the images below, it’s not that hard.

For this example, I will use Garritan Instruments for Finale, but after learning how to create your own custom Percussion Layout, you may use whatever sound library you like.īecause some people, like myself, learn best when they see each action performed, I’ve included a screenshot of every step of the process.

The staff will include bass drum, hand clap, and tambourine.

In today’s “tutorial,” we’ll create a custom percussion staff of three instruments to accompany a choir. He occasionally wants to add a percussion staff to his choral pieces and suggested we create a tutorial on how to set up a custom percussion staff. One suggestion came from a user who writes mostly for choir. In a recent blog post, we asked readers to tell us what they would like to see in future posts.
