I really know that I should be posting this on the finale forums, but I love and trust all of you so much more than ";those guys"; :)

Anyhoooo, I am writing a show in Finale 2008a  on my PC that will start out with the front ensemble playing a portion of the melody and I want it to add instruments as the phrase progresses and repeats. So here's what I did.......

I simply created a new expression and called it ";3rd time only"; and kept the playback value set to ";none";, set it to play on pass 3 and it was then created. However it did not work. I tried a few others on the ";2nd time only"; and ";4th time only"; but to no avail.

There is a ";2nd time only"; pre-programmed that also has the key velocities set to 75 while ";play only on pass 2"; selected (Why the change in key velocities, I still do not know). This one did not work either.

There must be something I am doing wrong, obviously, but I have searched through these forums and the finale forums over and over again and probably just haven't searched properly for the right words or something. If you have any info on this I would LOVE to hear from you!!!! Also if you are able to help, thank you so much in advance. If I left anything out, please let me know.

Brian D.
USMC D+B

Problem solved! :) Don't try this stuff on multiple instruments going through the same midi channel, and also could be a source of problems if you don't put the ";mute"; expression in FIRST!

Hmmm, I'm still having some troubles here. When I enter in the ";play 2nd time through"; and change the velocity, I recognize that it is doing it's job in changing the velocity. However, when I put in the ";mute"; expression, it mutes the passage all of the way through every time it repeats. I'm going to tinker with it some more here.

Thanks Tyler!!!!! Now time to go try it out and hope it works!!! :D

Play on Pass only effects [i]when[/i] the expression will be triggered in a repeat section.  So if you have Playback Effect set to 'None', the expression is set to do absolutely nothing on pass 2 or whenever.  The change in key velocities is to trigger playback on/off.

Unless anyone else has an easier way to do this, this is how you would create the effect for an instrument you only want to play on pass 2-

1) Create your ";Second Time Only"; Expression and set it to a Key Velocity/CC#7 of 64 (or whatever your dynamic needs to be) along with a ";Play Only on Pass 2"; effect.
2) Create a second Expression called ";Mute";.  Set the Playback Effect to Key Velocity and set the value to 0.  Set the ";Play on Pass"; to 1
3) Right-click on the Mute expression's handle and un-check 'Show' to hide the expression so it will not print

It gets a little more complicated for further sections (such as play on pass 4).  You would need to create multiple Mute expressions (such as play on pass 1, pass 2, pass 3,) and so on.