change from choral oohs to aahs without redoing everything?

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JONATHAN LUTZ Posted March 03, 2017 17:32

What is giving me a headache is trying to change choral oohs to aahs back and forth in a large score with full men's and women's choruses: to make mid-score changes to the sound involves changing the instrument for each staff for a region. This wouldn't be so bad, but doing this ends up changing the clef and staff names too. All I want is to affect playback, not change the "instrument" as it were. Isn't there any way to do this without rebuilding 8 (4 + 4) extra voices in the right clefs and with names that don't mess up the "normal" 8 voices? If not, what is the easiest way to do what I need to do?

It would be so great just to choose a region and zap it with "choral aahs" or "choral oohs" without it screwing everything up. I might add that I am very frustrated by the lack of vocal alternatives in Garritan (and other available in Finale?), and am happy that I finally got MIDI output to an external module working for jazz scat sound (Roland), but the Roland choral sounds are not so great other than jazz scat so I would prefer to "play finale through audio units" rather than everything via MIDI through the Roland.

(mac OS El capitan, Finale 2014.5).

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Kevin M. Posted March 03, 2017 18:33

Hello Jonathan,

If you go to MIDI/Audio > Audio Units Banks and Effects and then click the pencil to open the Aria player. To do this you'll need to set Choir Aahs, or Oohs (which ever is the opposite of your current assignment), to an empty channel. Note the channel that you assigned this sound to.

Then open your Score Manager (Command + K) and expand the Choir by clicking the triangle next to the choir. Then in which ever layers are not being used (for this example lets use layer 3) > under Ch and in line with the corresponding layer double click on the current channel and change it to the previously noted channel that you assigned in the Aria player.

Then after selecting the sections you want to change the playback to go to Edit > Move/Copy Layers, and then change the layer. This should allow you to have multiple sounds on one instrument/track.

JONATHAN LUTZ Posted March 03, 2017 19:02

Hi Kevin,

So the basic solution in that case is to use layers with different sounds and shift staff regions into appropriate layers. This does work. (No need to open the Aria player as far as I can see, just choose the sound in the list in score manager for another layer.) Since I will be making practice videos with scrolling notation I will then at a later time alter all layer colors to black so as not to confuse singers with black/red/green/blue changes, at which point all layers will look the same to me as editor of course:)

I thought I read that mid-score patch changes could work using the MIDI tool and tried my best using that (continuous data, patch) but failed to change the sound. I also think I read that mid-score patch changes without creating new instruments could be done when using Finale output to MIDI (instead of Audio), but don't know.

In any case, I will go with your suggestion unless someone has a more efficient way, thanks.

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