How long did it take me to typeset and publish my harp arrangement of the Andante from Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4? Let’s find out!
As I mentioned in my last post, the piano transcription that I was working from is five pages long. I estimated that it might take me about 5 hours to enter all the notes into Finale as a first draft, and 5 hours to make all the changes, add pedal markings and fingerings and general polish. Here’s how long it actually took:
MUSIC ENTRY:
I use a midi keyboard to enter notes into Finale* and I’m fairly fast at it.
This first rough draft entry took about 4 hours – beating my estimate by a bit (but still roughly in line with what I thought).
CREATING THE ARRANGEMENT AND PROOFING/POLISH:
Next up was making the note changes that I needed to make, adding pedals and fingering, and making sure that everything looked nice and error free! (No errors, no, no!!!). Plus some additional research/consultation with the original organ version.
As I mentioned, I hadn’t written down a lot of markings on the copy I was playing myself so this process often involved playing a section at the harp, marking down any notes I was omitting from the piano version or which hand was playing which notes, writing down the fingerings, and then going back and entering this into Finale.
(I did at least already have the pedal changes written down!)
Here’s an example of bar from the piano version, and that same bar in my finished arrangement:


I want to highlight two aspects of this process, to give an idea of the process as a whole.
Fingering: On the one hand, fingering can be done quite easily, just using the articulation tool. Press and hold the number you want to enter (1,2,3, or 4) and click on the note and voila, the fingering is there! You can even make it so that 1 is always on top of 2 (unlike the piano, where the right hand fingering would have 2 above 1).
HOWEVER, to get that final level of polish you will need to make sure the fingerings are on the right side of the note (above or below, depending on what makes sense in that situation) and often do some manual adjustment to get them just right.
You want them to avoid the noteheads and stems, but also not take up too much space, and above all be readable.

Layout: By default Finale does a good job of making sure each bar is legible and not too squished or stretched. And of course you can just go with that default version.
But that might mean that sometimes, for example, the last page contains only a single bar (or two, or three) – much better to fit that bar or bars onto the previous page or pages – sometimes moving bars back in a domino effect over one or more pages.
I like to make the overall size of the music a bit bigger than the default (+10% ideally), while also trying to fit as many bars and systems on page as I can (fewer pages turns!), all while making sure it’s easy to read, and, if at all possible, has convenient page turns (the last bar of a page-turn page would ideally have nothing for the left hand to play towards the end of the bar).
For both fingerings and layout the default is generally not terrible, you’re already 80% there, but it’s getting that last 20% of polish that can take a bit of time!
In the end, gradually refining the first typeset version until I had the finished version took about 6 and a half hours. Longer than I had guessed.
So now, after about 10 and a half hours, I had a nicely typeset, finished version! This is not far off the 10 hours I had estimated…
BUT I still needed to write something about the piece and my arrangement of it, along with some performance notes and explanation of signs.
I almost always do this, even though I know most people (hey, myself included for many pieces!) will never read it… I want to put out something that is complete and scholarly (and I enjoy the process, to a large extent).

NEXT, design a cover (more on covers in a later blog post)

And even once I had the finished PDF (cover, notes, music, one last check for anything amiss…) my job was still not done. I had to figure out what price to charge (more on this in another post as well!), create it as a “product” on my online store and fill in all the relevant details, and upload the file before I was finally ready to press publish! (Hmm, and then write a newsletter to let people know about it!).
Writing the notes (2 pages worth), designing the cover, and getting it all set up on my store took another 4 hours.
FINALLY TALLY? 14.5 hours. More than the 10 I had roughly guessed at (almost 50% more).
Breaking it down, the initial typesetting was actually a bit faster than I thought it might be (the left hand part in particular was pretty easy to typeset).
The polishing part took longer than I thought, and then I severally underestimated the time for the cover, notes, and store setup.
Like so many projects that we humans attempt, it can be very easy to underestimate :) At the same time, I think 14.5 hours is not SO bad an amount of time for something of this particular length and complexity.
And the goal was not necessarily to match my estimate, but rather to gather some precise information so that future estimates could be even more accurate.
My takeaway from this was that I will remember in the future to budget a reasonable amount of time for the cover, notes, and store setup (which are necessary for any project) and also that polishing a rough draft can take longer than I think.
But was it worth it??
I’ll get to that in my next post – stay tuned :)
Cheers,
Josh
*Using the speedy entry I can either:
Press and hold one or more keys on the midi keyboard and enter a keystroke on my computer keyboard to tell Finale what duration the note/s should be.
Or I can have caps lock set on my computer keyboard and stipulate a note value (8th notes, for example) and then as soon as I press a key or keys on the midi keyboard those notes (at the assigned value) will appear in Finale.
Between those two options things can go pretty quickly and over the years I’ve gotten fairly good at note entry, although I’m always learning new things!
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