With greater patience than I possess, I would probably find this answer by combing the forums.  But lacking such patience and hungry for a quick and dirty solution...

As an example of my needs, I have a vibraphone part in which, for one measure, the player plays temple blocks.  I can change the staff style using the VDL2.5 Woodblocks mapping, but how do I (or can I) get the one measure to sound like temple blocks and not vibraphone?

Thanks!

Hi Blake - your honesty is appealing. :) The best way to do this is instead of loading your vibraphone, load the ";Empty Bank"; from VDL 2.5, and make sure it's set to the same channel that you want this staff to play through. Then drag your vibraphone into slot 001 and your temple blocks patch into slot 002. You've now loaded two patches into a bank on the same channel. To switch to the instrument in slot 002, you would do what's called a ";program change";. There are a few different ways you can do this in Finale, but one of the simplest here would probably be to set a playback option to the ";Temple Blocks"; text that you've probably written into the score. If you've written a text note using a note expression such as ";To temple blocks";, go to the text expression designer in final, and click the ";playback"; tab, and tell it to do a program change to a value of 2 (since temple blocks are in slot 2 in Kontakt Player). When you need to switch back to vibes, you'd do the same thing back to 1.

If you don't want to assign these playback functions to text, you can also do this using the MIDI tool. If you're not used to using the MIDI tool, you can read about it in your Finale documentation. Pay particular attention to what the manual says about ";patch change"; or ";program change";.

Great!  I think I got it.  Thanks for your help, Jim.