Alex Yoder's Blog

Star Wars opening scene to Holst’s “Mars”

Alex — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:20:22 +0000

I did this a long time ago for a project in high school and I just remembered how awesome it was. So I replicated it to share:

Website Redesign

Alex — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:37:07 +0000

I took some time to redesign my personal website (the one you’re probably looking at now). I wanted to separate my music better, and make it easier to navigate. Also, I added a small “design” page to showcase some of my web design work. Let me know what you think, or if something doesn’t seem to look right (I probably haven’t tested it in other browsers as much as I should have).

Where we’re going, we don’t need words

Alex — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:13:48 +0000

The Subcontrabassflute

Alex — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:11:17 +0000

Finale: doubling note values while preserving time signature changes

Alex — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:34:19 +0000

Here is what my situation was, and what I did to fix it:

I had a piece of music with alternating sections of 3/4 and 4/4.

To double the music I did the following:
1. Highlight the entire piece
2. Go to Utilities > Change > Note Durations
3. Select 200% and UNCHECK rebar music
4. Your piece now looks ridiculous
5. Highlight a section of music in one time signature
6. Click the Time Signature tool, set it to the correct time signature (should already be there), and make sure Rebar is checked
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each section of a different time signature
8. Since this tool fails at putting music in the same relative position (i.e. it ignores whole rests, and even if you use the plugin that fills with real whole rests it interprets them as 4 beats when seen in a 3/4 measure), you will probably have to move some of your music around using the mass move tool
9. Move your expressions to the new correct locations

Finale 2010 Swing

Alex — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:25:32 +0000

I can’t make a section of my piece swing. I tried everything in the manual, none of it works. Checked the Finale forums and apparently this is a known issue. So I guess I’ll have to change the Human Playback style to “Jazz” for the entire piece of music, and switch it back to “Standard” when I’m working on the straight sections. Not sure how I’ll get a recording that way. Is this what happens when your business model involves releasing a new version of your software every year without backwards compatibility?

EDIT: Composer J.R. Trimpe sent me an e-mail with a possible solution. He says that he was able to work around the problem by creating a blank misc expression that sets the swing value and assigning it to every staff. He then uses a normal expression to take care of the text. I have not tried this yet (the arrangement I was working on is finished), but hopefully it will work for anyone else with this problem!

The Cows in the Corn

Alex — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:53:55 +0000

LOL my name is in a Google Ad

Alex — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:11:07 +0000

Hans Zimmer scoring the Joker’s theme for the Dark Knight

Alex — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:49:46 +0000

No Flash Support on the iPhone?!?!

Alex — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:56:29 +0000