No matter your instrument or your skill level at reading music, good old chord symbols are invaluable — for actually playing chords on but also much more. Non-chordal instruments such as trumpet or sax rely on them for melodic ideas, and good drummers like to see chord symbols in order to mold their playing to a song’s harmonic changes.
In Finale, you set chord symbols using the Chord tool, and each symbol is attached to a note. Sometimes, this “hard” connection between chords and notes is helpful. If you add a measure, for example, all the chord symbols automatically reposition. There are some playback benefits as well, such as automatic harmonic functions. It’s all logical and tidy.
Except in real life, you often want to set chord symbols set where the melody is not. For example, you might want a chord change on beat 3 of a measure whose melody is just a single whole note. You might want chord symbols in measures with no melody notes at all.
In my work as music editor for Berklee Press (the publishing arm of Berklee College of Music) I see all kinds of crazy ways authors try to deal with this. Some might assign two chord symbols to one note, then manually move one over. They might even try to use the Text tool. But then if they delete or resize a measure, what a mess — they have a million fiddly adjustments to make.
Fortunately, there is a way dissociate chord symbols from the melody so that all of Finale’s usual benefits are preserved. It requires a few steps, but the results are perfect in terms of layout and playback. The trick is to assign chord symbols to invisible rests that live in a different layer than the melody. Here’s how. Note: instructions for steps appear below their corresponding screen shots.
Step 1. Let’s say this is the measure you want. So you can see how it looks printed out, I’ve turned off the colors. To make it extra-complicated, this measure doesn’t have any notes, just a whole rest and two chord symbols.
Step 2. Switch to layer 4. Either choose “Layer 4” from the popup menu at the bottom left corner of the Document window, or from the menu bar at View > Select Layer > Layer 4.
Step 3. Enter rests that correspond to your desired rhythm for the chord changes. We want a chord on beats 1 and 3, so I’ve entered two half-rests in layer 4. You can then assign chord symbols to these. Notice that layer 4’s notes and rests are blue. Finale’s color-coding helps you tell which elements are in which layers.
Step 4. Next, we use a Staff Style to make the rests invisible. Choose the Staff tool, highlight the measure, then go Staff > Assign Staff Style, and choose “Blank Notation: Layer 4” as your style. Better yet, use the Contextual Menu shortcut (ctrl-click on Mac, right-click on Windows), to get the popup shown here.
Step 5. Switch back to layer 1 and add whatever notation you want. I’ll add a “hard” whole rest here, but any notation you put here will be independent of the chord symbols in layer 4.
Jonathan Feist is managing editor of Berklee Press, the book-publishing arm of Berklee College of Music. He’s the creator and instructor of the online course “Music Notation with Finale,” editor of the book Finale: An Easy Guide to Music Notation by Tom Rudolph and Vince Leonard, and co-author of Essential Songwriter and The Berklee Practice Method Teacher’s Guide. Visit his blog at jonathanfeist.berkleemusicblogs.com.