Had an idea that would speed up input that could be built on the already working cueing feature.
Cueing as it works now pertains to ‘listen for this entrance because you’re up next’-kind of cues. It would be neat if in the popover I could specify that this is a ‘hey composer, maybe you wan’t bassoons to go with this’-kind of cue that comes with an already attached “Cue------” line.
The next step in this would be to add a ‘Col’ feature. I imagine I can select a passage in Violin I, engage popover and type
FL1 8va
OB1
BN1 8vb
and it writes it in.
Let me stop you before you scream “HAVE YOU HEARD OF COPY AND PASTE?”
This would take advantage of what the groundbreaking feature of linked cueing added that any changes are reflected in the ‘copied’ passages.
Moreover I think it would be übercool if I could nudge along the newly created flute part, select a note, move it down an octave and the rest of the passage is moved an octave. Then proceed to the next note that would be the first to be 8va again.
I guess what you’re describing is perhaps similar to Finale’s “Mirror” tool, where a region of one staff is “linked” to some other region, and changes in the source are automatically transferred to the destination region.
Although it never worked properly and they removed it in Finale 25.
But yes: I write a lot of music where the Oboes double the Violins; and both double one of the vocal parts (at pitch or up the octave) ; so some ‘intelligent’ way of handling that kind of thing would be great.
Though I imagine there’s a lot of checking to make sure that you don’t get ‘infinite loop’ of staves all depending on each other.
I’m intrigued by this. For those of you who were pen/pencil composers or who were copyists for pen/pencil composers, this sort of thing was really common. Here are a couple random examples by different arrangers I used to copy for:
Some sort of col/copyback feature that would automatically update with changes could be useful. I think there would also need to be a way to delink it from the original source material too, in case later on edits needed to be made at one part or location and not another. Copy and Paste and then a quick octave transposition is already really fast, but an auto-updating col feature could be a cool idea.
I still recall my freshman year in college when I hand copied parts for a now well established arranger/orchestrator. In one song with several “stanzas” he gave me a concert sketch in which each stanza ended with a transition measure and then said go back to measures x-y and transpose the next stanza up a semitone from the one before. So in addition to making sure I had Bb trumpets and several types of Saxes properly adjusted, I needed to take everything up a semitone for at least three of four stanzas.
That it turned out as well as it did is something I look back on with satisfaction.
The Local 802 (NYC Musicians Union) still allows for a 50% premium for transposition on most wage scales if the copyist has to do it. Obviously in the pre-computer era that would substantially eat in to budgets/profits for the arranger, so most of a certain age provided transposed scores to the copyist.
Both of the above examples are by phenomenal composer/arrangers, but the top example is concert and is by a guy a bit younger than arranger of the bottom example, who always writes transposed scores. The arranger of the top example uses plenty of copyback notation too.
Didn’t know Finale had that feature but I’m glad that others could see the benefit of it. It’s true that there should be a limit as to how many times you could link through. For example I would like to give Flute 1 ‘Col VL1’ and still be able to give Oboe 1 an entrance cue from Flute 1 and give Flute 2 an optional cue from Flute 1.
