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Quick Chord Symbol Entry on the Mac with a Keyboard Maestro Icon Palette

March 13, 2022 By Jon Burr Leave a Comment

Quicker ChordTwo or more notes played simultaneously; a group of three or more notes played or sung at the same time to create harmony. Entry in Finale

Finale’s Chord Tool has an extension picker shortcut that appears when the user types a chord root followed by “:” and “0” (number zero) and a “space” character, which might come as a revelation for many users struggling with chord input. It brings up the chord librarySets of musical symbols, expression markings, and other important musical elements stored as independent files that can be exported and imported to Finale, where you can pick an extension for your chord with one click, or create one with the editing tools.

On opening this you’ll notice little numbers in the box occupied by each extension, representing id #’s for each variant. 

With those ID numbers, instead of typing a zero after the colon, if you type the id number corresponding to the chord you want before hitting the spacebar, Finale inserts it into the scoreA written representation of a piece of music, including the notation for all parts of an ensemble..

If we knew all these extension numbers, we’d be able to shorten the picking process by typing in the symbol, then the colon, then the extension ID number. 

This can already save a lot of time – but learning all these extension ID numbers is a bit much, and easy to forget if you don’t use them every day. You could trim the Chord Symbol library down considerably, or rearrange them so the ones you use most are near the top. Instead, we found a way to make chord suffix selection fast and easy using a floating icon palette in Keyboard MaestroA scripting environment on the Mac capable of saving hours of work, used by power users to trigger scripts, often from collections of scripts organized into palettes.

Keyboard MaestroOne of Finale's music character fonts. Both TrueType and PostScript versions are supported. Icon Palette

Keyboard Maestro supports Macros and Groups. A Macro is an individual script, and a Group is a collection of macros. In a Group, Macros can be displayed in a palette with an icon representing its action. You can open the Palette with a shortcut, or listing in another palette, then click its icons to complete your chord entries.

Setting this up involves a few steps. 

Let’s assume you’ve already created your custom chords in Finale, or know which ones you’ll use most often.

1. Take a screenshot of the open Chord Extension Picker/Editor in Finale

This enables you to see the ID numbers associated with your extensions, and do screen grabs to make the icons.

2. Create a new Group in Keyboard Maestro

Set the Palette editor’s options for it, checking “Show Icons Only.” You can define the icon size and number of columns, the palette color, and whether it stays open or closes after one action.

3. Begin building your macros.

Add an action from Keyboard Maestro’s “Text” group – “InsertText inserts are shortcodes that allow you to share the same text information on multiple pages (such as a title or part name) or easily add characters with special properties (like page numbers or musical symbols) without manually entering information. Create inserts using the Text > Inserts submenu. Text by Typing.” That’s the only action you’ll need. Then enter your text string, being sure to use the ID number associated with the extension you want to use. Into the action’s text field, type a colon (:), the ID#, and a spacebar press.

4. Add the icon

Open your Chord Extensions screenshot in the Preview app on the Mac, drag-select around the chord symbol you want, hit ⌘C (copy), then click in the little icon field in Keyboard Maestro’s macro editor and paste your selection in there. Your icon shows up.

Repeat until you have all the ones you want in there.

Save Your Chord Library for Reuse

In order for this to work in all your documents, be sure to save your Finale chord library, if you’ve customized it, and load it into other documents, including new ones, or your Templates or Default Documents. Notea symbol used to represent a specific pitch and duration that Finale templates might have different chord libraries, depending on the font used in the template. If you do that, it’ll always work.

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Chord Entry, Keyboard Maestro

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