Harmonic Analysis and Figured Bass with Finale 2011

Recently started studying music theory at a community college.  As a classically-trained musician the class fills in so many pieces.  For years I would play classical pieces and sort of feel what was going on.  Based on intuition, common sense, and deduction I sort of knew what was happening behind the scenes, or at least knew that, behind the scenes, certain things were going on.  Now I’m actually studying those things in detail and its very rewarding.

Mostly all of our work is done by pen (actually pencil) and paper, but I’ve been interested in using what is considered one of the top music notation software applications, Finale, to try to work with scores.  I suppose “daunting” begins to describe using an application like it.  But actually I’ve found that just knowing how to do several key things makes a big difference.

One major aspect of what we’re doing in class is analyzing music, determining what chords a work comprises.  Since chords can be inverted, we also need to take note of what type of inversion each chord is.

Many of our exercises require us to mark the symbols for chords beneath notes along with figured bass symbols.

I was able to obtain a copy of Finale 2011 however as far as I could tell it lacks the ability to create these notations.  On the Finale website the makers of the program tout that the new version 2012 has a new font, Finale Numerics font, which is designed for such notation.

When I came across the above page I basically began salivating.  The two links off that page for harmonic analysis and figured bass are exactly what we’re doing in class!

I then began researching this.  Someone in a forum suggested finding a way to get a copy of the Finale Numerics font and simply copy it onto a system running Finale 2011.  Easier said than done, until I found a trick:

Anyone can download and install Finale Notepad which is basically a viewer which can view scores created with Finale.  The trick is to install it and then (under Windows) go to Settings -> Control Panel -> Fonts and look for “Finale Numerics Regular” in the list of fonts.  Right-click on it and select “Copy”.

Now, on any system you have Finale 2011 installed on, copy that file, right-click on it and select “Install”.

Voila!  You now have the Finale Numeric font available for harmonic analysis and figured bass notation with Finale 2011.

For convenience’ sake here is the actual font.  (File has been zipped for security reasons.  You will need to unzip it with 7-zip before installing it.)