Percussion Part help on Finale 2011

From a question I posted elsewhere:

When setting up the score to begin composing, there are all sorts of different Percussion instruments you can choose.

Choosing the general "Percussion" part and adding it to the part list gives you a number of percussion instruments, but I found that several are repeated outside of the general "Percussion" part. I was wondering what the difference was and where, for instance, I could find a suspended cymbal.

If I need to elaborate, just ask.

Just pick whichever you like, any general percussion part will have the same sounds on it. "Suspended cymbal" on Finale is really just a crash cymbal sound rolled. Just make sure you mark every part. Get a hold of some scores with percussion parts to see what exactly you need to do to follow conventions, there are a lot of important conventions for percussion parts.

You'll have to peck around a bit to find where the 'crash symbol' sound is, if you're working on getting a good audio rendition. But it's one of the easier ones. You could do a single-line staff for suspended cymbal, but I'd just put all the auxilliary stuff on general percussion staves (one per person, basically).

Okay, thanks. I'll do that as soon as I find enough free time to boot Finale up.

See if you can open (copy+paste into web search) this:

file://machd/Applications/Finale%20PrintMusic%202009/Help%20Files/PrintMusic_Left.htm#SkinName=NewWindow

Otherwise, search your finale help index for "Template Percussion Mappings" and it will show you where each instrument is in the percussion stave.