Templates

There’s a term in woodworking circles for a very important tool.  Its something called a “jig”, which basically is a tool you create to help you make other pieces, or help to repeatedly and accurately make cuts or other features for a given project.  If you’ve ever done any woodworking, you know a jig can be immensely valuable, saving you time and effort while giving consistent, repeatable results for your work.  I did a good bit of woodworking with my father growing up and even in middle school where we had a shop class!  Some of my first building projects were making jigs for other furniture builds.

When it comes to music engraving, we have similar tools that help create accurate and beautiful sheet music.  Ah, templates!  Truly, these can be life savers in our industry.  Having the tools to quickly, and predictably setup any piece of music and know you have systems in place that can adjust to any situation is extremely valuable.  Another valuable feature of a good template is the savings in time and money for our clients.  Being able to take a certain process that had once taken 30 minutes to accomplish and now thanks to your template takes only 10 minutes to achieve the same results, means major cost savings.

Templates, whether in Finale, Sibelius or any music notation program, are the bread and butter for any serious engraver.   These can be files that have been refined over years of experience or even work processes where knowing how a piece of music should be formatted and then finding the most direct path to achieving that finished product eliminates errors and inefficiencies.  When a major project or unusual piece of music, or really tight deadline comes along, there isn’t time to guess or hope that each piece of music will be uniform, clear, concise and accurate.  That’s where the time spent refining a template or work process really shows its value because those issues are already handled by the template.
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Here are Engraver’s Mark Music, we are constantly adjusting, refining, and improving our templates and workflow processes to achieve maximum efficiency, accuracy, repeatability and flexibility for our clients.  Also, we can custom design a template to your specific needs and directions.  Contact us today and let us show you how powerful these tools can be and how a little investment in templates from Engraver’s Mark Music can turn into some serious time and money savings for years to come!