Attack of the Clones!
September 15, 2014 12:00 pm
Cloning Lyrics
Okay, hopefully this will be more helpful to you than George Lucas’ episode 2, in all its glory. Personally, I’m not really a fan of cloning. I think there are some inherent risks involved, like accidentally cloning Jack the Ripper, Hitler or maybe Carrot Top, for example. However, when it comes to lyrics, I’m all about cloning. If you’ve never cloned lyrics before, please sit down for this…
Let’s say, you’ve got a vocal arrangement containing different staves with vocal parts on each of them, but at times they all sing the same lyrics. Instead of re-typing all of those lyrics or using the Selection Tool to copy them from staff to staff, you can “clone” the lyrics.
- Select the Lyrics Tool. Then go to “Lyrics/Clone Lyric”
- Now, you can select portions of the music much like you would with the selection tool. Simply, highlight the region containing the lyrics you like, and simply drag them to the staff that you want to be a duplicate. Easy, huh?
- Here’s the best part: After you finish your first rehearsal and the vocalists tell you that you typed “I’ve hat the time of my wife” instead of “I’ve had the time of my life,” you simply make the changes in one place. Finale fixes your minor fashion faux pas in every place where you cloned the lyric.
Let’s review: George Lucas clones = bad, Finale lyric clones = good. You can stand up now…
– Many thanks to my good friend and vocal arranger David Wise, who first taught me about cloning lyrics. I nearly had a coronary when he first showed me this.
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