This blog is about ...

... helping marching percussionists notate their music using the programs Finale and Virtual Drumline.

Finale is a powerful program, but the learning curve is very steep. I have been using the program since about 1994 and can get around in it pretty well. In the beginning, you really had to manipulate Finale to get drumline battery and percussion parts to look correctly. Finale has made a lot of improvements over the last 15 years to help this process along, but there are still a lot of little customizations that need to be made to get it to display and playback marching percussion as we all know it. And then there is Finale 2010 ...

Virtual Drumline is awesome. In the beginning, my marching snare sound was the "hand clap" in general midi bank 118. The best sound that I could provide for my tenors made it sound like I was marching a line of log drums. Now, I have authentic sounds for every percussion instrument that I can think of .... if I can only get Finale to play them back.

I will post lessons on how to make all of this work. Feel free to email me any questions.

L