Cross-staffing in Finale

[Latios212]

Cross-staffing in Finale  by Latios212

This is a technical guide to cross-staffing notes in full Finale. It will go over how to make the program cross-staff notes, but not advise on when you should do so or provide good notational practices when doing so (we can write those up somewhere else if needed).

I'm using Finale 2014, but the same tools should be available in other versions (not Notepad), though the buttons may look a bit different or be located in different places.


First, write out the notes you want on a single staff. Then, find the Note Mover tool and select the Cross Staff option.

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Then, click on the staff that has the notes and drag the boxes for the noteheads you want to move to the staff you want to move them to. You can click and drag to select multiple noteheads instead of moving each individually.

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Depending on what you're writing, that may be all you need to do if you want to leave the beams untouched.

You may want the beams to go in between the staves, though. In this case, find the Reverse Stem tool and select the appropriate boxes for notes that need to be reverse stemmed. (Note: these next couple of steps may take a little bit of playing around with.)

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Next, find the Stem Direction tool and point the first note in each group up or down as desired. (You can also press L while in the Simple Entry Tool.)

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Lastly, you may need to adjust the beam angle of the tool using nothing other than the Beam Angle tool! Use the left box for each beam to adjust the starting position of the beam and the right box to adjust the right endpoint relative to the left.

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There are a lot of different ways you may want to cross-staff notes that don't match the simple example I provided above. But toying around with the few tools I mentioned above should get Finale to do pretty much whatever you need it to.

[Onionleaf]

Great guide! Just a quick point to note that by default Finale doesn't show the Note Mover tool icon. You can add the Advance Tools Palette to your toolbar by going to Window > tick "Advance Tools Palette" (see screenshot below).



Also, I usually skip the second-to-last step (using the Stem Direction tool) and instead use the Beam Angle tool (your last step) to drag the beams to where I want to position them - when you drag the leftmost note of the beam, it will change the beam's position rather than its angle.

Hope this helps!