Great post Terry!

I just got my Finale 2005 a couple of days ago and I absolutely love the marching percussion sounds. Unfortunately, it doesn't transform the sound of my older files to the newer sound fonts. In Finale 2001-3 you could just copy and paste to a new drum file to update the sound mapping. But so far I've had to reenter anything I wanted to use the new sound fonts on. If you know a better way, please help.

Anyway, the easiest and best way to start to get proper drum mapping and sound is to use the setup wizard and select the marching percussion menu and items. This already has preset drum mapping. If you need to figure out what line/spaces or shapes you need for proper playback, then go to Staff Attribute (treble clef) and double click on the staff box in the left upper corner(for ex. snare drum) to bring up the attributes. Go to the percussion mapping section by clicking select next to Notation Style. Click on edit for that map and you can sroll up and down the left side to determine what lines/spaces create which which notes/effect. Hope that makes sense.

Good luck and I absolutely recommend Finale 2005.

I just got Finale 2005 but I'm still using Virtual Drumline. It may be more of a pain to setup but the sound difference is night and day. I would highly recommend using a midi controller/keyboard for input. Makes things MUCH faster (I can't imagine doing it the old way).

how so? I've just learned speedy entry in Finale, and it's quite a breeze to write music now.

my play back works good except some flams (not all) sound like an 1/8 note especially at the beginning of a measure.
I have adjusted the EDU setting on playback but it still sounds bad in those spots.

For flams, don't use the flam articulation. Add a 16th note grace note in front of the main note. I have my grace note length to 20 EDU's, but it's whatever you think sounds good.

Has anyone found books or tutorials that discuss percussion notation in Finale?

I have done some research on the Internet. Unfortuantely, I have found very little. I have noticed a variety of techniques used by seasoned Finale users.

Middle Aged Man mentioned a book a long time ago, something like "The Art of Finale Notation?"
Although I don't think that was specifically tailored to percussion notation, you could probably cleverly use the techniques presented therein..

It's called Finale Power and it can be found here:

http://www.finalepower.com/

It details a lot of stuff that is not readily apparent in the Finale manual.

If I used the same steps as snare, could I map out unison bass parts(so that unison parts show up on the B line)? Is there much difficulty or a trick to do this?