Bring Color and Style to Your Sheet Music!

Written on 20 February 2025 - 205 views

Here is a two-bar staff in which I have written a few elements.

First, we will export this file as a PDF. To do this in Finale:

• Go to the Graphic tool, then in the Graphic menu, select "Export Pages."
• Choose PDF from the dropdown menu and select "All Pages," then confirm by clicking OK.
• Name your file and save it in the desired location. To keep it simple, I place it on my desktop.

Now, you can exit Finale (or your music notation editor).

Software for Vectorization

To easily modify the color (and much more) in our document while maintaining optimal quality, we need to vectorize it. Even though a PDF is already a vector format, it is not always sufficient.

For this, we need good software. The first one that comes to mind is Inkscape, which has the advantage of being free. Otherwise, there is also Affinity Designer (not too expensive) and of course Illustrator.
I will continue my explanations with Illustrator, but note that the steps are almost identical.

Vectorizing Our Page

In Illustrator, click on Open and select your PDF.
Once the file is loaded, Illustrator will display a window informing you that it has already performed an initial vectorization of the text. No worries, simply click OK. Your sheet music will then appear in the workspace.

Now, to vectorize my text, I select everything, then go to Text > Create Outlines.
If I enlarge the window, take my white arrow tool, and click in the center of a notehead, I see that it is surrounded by multiple small blue dots.

That’s it! Now I am sure that it is no longer a font but actual vectors!
And this is what we are going to work with.

Coloring Our Musical Elements

Now that we are ready, let’s open the Swatches panel.
For this example, I have created four colors: red, blue, green, and yellow.

A useful tip:
At the top left of the Swatches panel, there are two overlapping squares:

• The black square represents the fill of an element. If you select it, you color the inside of the shape.
• The white square with a black outline represents the stroke of an element. If you select it, you only change the border color.
• The white square with a red diagonal line indicates transparency.

Here, my notehead is selected with the white arrow tool.
In the Swatches panel, I choose a color – let’s say green – and voilà, it is applied!
We do the same for the other notehead and the beam.

Let’s move on to the stems! This time, it is not the fill but the stroke of the element.
If you select the stem, you will see that the stroke square is black and the fill square is transparent.

So, I select my stems with the white arrow tool, click on the stroke square in the top left, then choose a color (green) again.

And there you have it! The only thing left is to save in the format of your choice.
With a bit of practice, you will see that you can do much more than just basic coloring!

I hope this tutorial is helpful to you, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

See you soon, here or elsewhere !

Chrys