Finale Lead Sheet Template

I was watching You're making lead sheets WRONG! Do it this way instead. on the Pandemonium Big Band YouTube channel. Elliot is doing all of his work in Sibelius and I use Finale. I took what he said and went with it, in Finale. I ended up setting up a lot of things differently than I used to and I think it will be useful. Hence, sharing it!

The Template

This is my first template. I thought it would be nice to have another with rhythm section, and bass for those tunes that are not simple lead sheets. I haven't needed to do that yet so it hasn't been done.

Download Lead Sheet Finale Template

How to Use the Template

1. Enter the melody and chords on the Concert staff.
2. Copy the concert part to the other three parts.
3. Drop the bass clef part down an octave.
4. If there is an initial tempo, I raise it up a bit. This gets it out of the way of chords.
   1. Select Expression Tool
   2. Right click initial tempo and select "Edit Expression Assignment..."
   3. Change Offset from Alignment Point > Vertical to 0.5

You're pretty much done at this point! Each part should look good and ready to distribute.

Decisions I Made

• I decided to leave the chord size at the default scale of 100%.
• I decided to use Finale Broadway Legacy font for chords. My wife and I like it better than the newer Broadway or older Jazz fonts.
• In Document Options > Beams, I turned off "Beam four eight notes together in common time" as it is easy to beam them if wanted and normally I don't want.
• In Document Options > Music Spacing, I tried turning on Avoid Collision of Articulations and Chords. It makes sense! I haven't seen it magically do anything as of yet.
• I set all articulations to be above the note always as that does seem to look good for jazz to my eyes.

Margins!

I find margins difficult in Finale. Everything will look great and then a new page is created and it looks totally different than the ones you started with! I tried to make sure as more pages are added, the pages looked consistent. I hope I succeeded!

I found that positioning from Page Edge was helpful for all of the Text placement. If I tried with margins, they moved around as I tried to move the music on each page. I'm using page margins to adjust the systems (music) and not the text (title, page number, copyright, etc.)

Attributions

I like the photo. It has nothing to do with jazz or lead sheets but I was frustrated trying to find anything that looked like a lead sheet that I could use. I couldn't seem to create anything I liked either. I may change this someday, but until then, thanks Mike!

Photo by Mike Castro Demaria (@mike_castro_demaria) on Unsplash