Building Successful Finale 'Chops' Book for Finale 2012 (Second Edition):

Building Successful Finale 'Chops', Second Edition (242 pages) was designed to be a practical, everyday guide to help musicians, music educators, composers and arrangers learn how to use Finale 2012 music notation software to create their own musical compositions, arrangements and teaching materials.

The core of this text consists of 21 practical, project-based tutorials with step-by-step directions from beginning to completion. These tutorials are written in easy-to-understand language and are tried and true examples that have been successfully used as the curriculum for author Mavis Kallestad's Level 1 and 2 Finale workshops.


The tutorials include projects for setting up various instrumental and vocal scores, worksheets, flash cards and other classroom music tools, percussion notation, lead sheets, creating SmartMusic files and more. Learn how to use Finale's new streamlined features to increase your productivity.... everything from the basics, to new features and more advanced notation topics. View book content


This manual works equally well as a school course/workshop textbook or for individual study.

To try out a tutorial, download a FREE sample:

BEGINNING NOTATION (Grand Staff tutorial,8 pages)
Covers the basic Finale tools used to set up a grand staff score, enter notes and rests (Simple Entry), enter an accent, staccato, 2-note slur, crescendo, fermata, dynamic marking, repeat sign, move measures and basic page layout.

Free Beginning Notation Tutorial for Finale 2012

Free Beginning Notation Tutorial for Finale 2011