The recommended entry of Figured Bass as pseudo-Lyrics simply does not work well enough for practical musicianship (experts and good amateurs in Baroque music).
It creates conflicts of document settings and font settings against real lyrics, making it hard to update or maintain a document without messing up other things.
The Numerics font forces the figures to look like Times New Roman, which the client of the commissioned typesetting work might not want.
The figures act like text, and don't transpose when the composition gets transposed.
Lyrics baseline defaults to be below the staff, but many players and original sources expect the figured bass to be above the staff it belongs to. This again conflicts with positioning of real lyrics.
There are compositions in the literature that need four figures on a bass note, not only three. (For example, CPE Bach's book, "Accompaniment" chapter; or JS Bach's violin sonatas with continuo.)
It creates a big time commitment to enter a bunch of ALT character codes or special symbols, just to be able to add figured numerals and accidentals to a figured bass part. Who can remember all of those without printing out a "cheat sheet" of the table from the manual?
When an unchanging long bass note needs several sets of figures, there needs to be an easier procedure to align them than the current recommendation. (That is: make up dummy subdivided rests in another layer, attach figures to these rests, and then hide the layer of rests from printout without also making the figures disappear. Clunky and counter-intuitive....)
We need a real Figured Bass module, if possible: as working musicians who really perform from Baroque notation, along with composing within this style. When a keyboard player is able to figure the basso continuo part of an entire aria in 15 minutes with pencil and paper, but the same work on the part takes 3 or 4 hours do to inside Finale, it's prohibitively expensive as a time commitment.
Thanks for considering!
(v25.5.0.290 Windows)
4 comments
Date Votes