IMSLP Forums

Hi there, I'm a pretty knowledgeable Finale user for many years now, since the 1990s.

One thing I'm struggling with is typesetting divisi string parts. For example, in Le Sacre du Printemps, the cello line is a single stave, mostly, but then it will often divide into two or many more staves, depending on Stravinsky's intention.

I understand the concept of "hide staves" but having issues getting my head around a First violin part that might be one to 8 staves deep, all printed in ONE part.

Help!?

Finale has its own forum: http://www.finaleforum.com/

You can search an already-asked topic searching divisi parts site:http://www.finaleforum.com/ with Google

I'm well aware of the finale forum ... no answer there, which is why I posed my question here.

If you understand other languages: http://www.finaleforum.superflexible.net/

In my experience (Finale user since 1987, currently using Finale 2009) this is not one of the most elegantly solved issues in Finale.
If editing the entire score it's confusing to have the many empty staves (you can eliminate them in the "view" menu of scroll view). But you have to be very careful when using scroll view not to add anything to measures that are already hidden in an optimized staff.

From the Finale Forums:
"The way Finale works is that you add the staves to the entire document, and then remove the staves from the systems where you don't want them."

I would add to this sentence, that you cannot extract a Violin I part as a single part, once it is split into 8 divisi staves somewhere in the score. Instead you have to create a "group" for violin I and extract the entire group - Important: remove all individual staff names in the group and add "violin I" only as a group name. Then part extraction will let you extract them together as a group.
Now you would have a score of a "Violin I octet" with lots of empty staves. Optimize all the systems with no music added (that hides the empty staves) and if later manually changing the page layout you will have to remove optimization and then re-optimize in the staves where divisi staves start and end.

I hope I understood your problem and that my Finale 2009 experience is still relevant - otherwise excuse my pointing out the obvious

Hi and thanks to all for your input. It is a matter of adding x number of staves, then grouping them, removing names. I'm wondering if this sort of process is any easier when using Sibelius?