Theo Tigno

Composer and Musician

Creating Charts - A Graphic Designers Way

Using Finale PrintMusic with Adobe InDesign

I was up in Farmington, NM for Thanksgiving, spending time with Christie's parents and sister. While I was there, Christie's mom, who also happens to have a degree in music and leads music at her parish, wanted to hear the Mass of the Immaculate Conception. While hearing it, she found some errors in the charts that I originally came up with.

So, after seeing the errors, I figured if I'm going to fix the errors, I might as well go all the way and make them look better.

Without going into too much detail, I ...

  • Created a very basic, no chords chart in Finale PrintMusic
  • Used CutePDF Writer to generate the PDF
  • Imported the chart into Adobe InDesign
  • Made each system its own element and spaced it / added chords as needed

It took me longer than just simply doing it in Finale, but having the extra control helped me greatly. It was good to have the ability to add text notes as needed ... to space things out the way I wanted them space out ... etc.

I posted it online if you wanted to preview it on Issuu. I am pretty happy with the way it all turned out.

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    This website is for showcasing my compositions as well as a musician blog. For more information regarding my professional career, please visit my LinkedIn page.

    About Me

    I am a Catholic composer and musician. My compositions include music written for the Polk Street Band, a Mass setting (Mass of the Immaculate Conception) and Antiphon settings for the full year that are geared toward contemporary ensembles. As a musician, I am a bassist and guitarist for Catholic recording artists and bluegrass bands.