Who we are

I'm Mark Johnson, former documentation editor for Finale (from 2000-2012). My partner and wife is Kami Johnson. We met at MakeMusic and I proposed. She eventually accepted. In those days, John Paulson was president of MakeMusic. (I remember standing next to him in the restroom when he asked me if there was some sort of company policy about marrying a coworker. I hadn't checked. Apparently, he hadn't either!) That was around 2005, veritable glory days. 

Kami and I both started in technical support, so you may have already spoken with us! We both matured into QA. After that, I went the doc direction, she went the design direction. She played a very large part in designing the Finale UX experience we know today; from the 2008 UI overhaul, to the expression revamp, to the ScoreManager, and many other features in between. She knows Finale better than I do, as she has proven over and over in her editorial notes while reviewing my documentation drafts.

From 2004 to 2014, I wrote the Finale Trailblazer Guides, a series of Finale books whose scope stretched beyond what would be appropriate for official documentation. Why? Several reasons, but, as I wrote the Finale doc, I remember thinking: "well, there's a better way to do this with a third-party plugin or one of my weird workarounds." So, I wrote it, with Kami's help, and I think it helped a lot of people.

I made the difficult decision to leave MakeMusic in 2012. I did this, in part, to help pay the bills. Cybersecurity paid better (we had started a family). Kami left in 2014 when the company moved to Boulder. 

Kami and I live in Bloomington Minnesota with our two boys and two barn cats, Mango and Murray.

We've joined forces with two of our most talented and dedicated Finale developers, who are really the reason any of this is at all possible.