Category: Sibelius

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Legni Woodwind Fingering Font for Finale & Sibelius

Good music engravers are always on the lookout for inventive and elegant solutions to make their work easier. To me, one of the more interesting niche areas of typeset music notation are graphical fingering diagrams for musical instruments.

Fonts are the optimal solution for creating fingering diagrams in Finale or Sibelius. Since font characters are essentially vector graphics (as opposed to bitmapped graphics), they will look great when printed at any size, and remain clear and legible on screen.

There are several shareware and freeware fingering diagram fonts currently available for both woodwind and brass instruments from enterprising font designers. I covered a few of these in a previous post.

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Finale & Sibelius Quick Tip : Grouping Barlines in Your Score

Q: I am dealing with bar lines that go through multiple parts in a score. I would like to group the instrument choirs rather than having bar lines running down the entire score. Is there an easy fix for this in Sibelius and / or  Finale?

grouped-barlines

A: Yes, absolutely.

In Sibelius, click at the bottom of the staff right at the point where the bar line joins the bottom staff line. A box will show up. Click and drag the box down and the staves will become joined or separated.

In Finale, in Staff Attributes there is an attribute called “Break Barlines between staves” which controls whether the bar lines join with the staff above that particular instrument.

That’s all there is to it.

~robert

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Piano Music for Four Hands in Sibelius

In this tutorial I will show you the workflow I use to create a 4 hands piano score, and optionally, how to export a midi/audio reference.

Piano music for four hands has in general the lower part (Secondo) notated on the left hand pages, and the higher part (Primo) notated on the right hand pages. This way, the two players can easily read their own parts while following the other player’s part.

Notation template In this example I will create a basic template with 4 pages having 5 systems each, in which every system has 4 bars, what would be 20 bars on a page and a total of 80 bars on 4 pages. Later when you to enter the music, you can always add or delete bars on a page. The screenshots are all in Sibelius 6, but the principals are exactly the same for Sibelius 7.x

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Sibelius Quick Tip : Text Wildcards List

A wildcard is a special kind of text object that can insert text from somewhere else. For instance, Sibelius has a number of useful wildcards for various page text elements (title, subtitle, composer, copyright etc). When you change the information in Score Info, the text on the page will automatically update.

The syntax for text wildcards is a backslash, followed by a dollar sign, then the wildcard label and finally, a closing backslash. Case does not matter; they can be all upper case, all lower case, or mixed case.

Sibelius also has some formatting change wildcards, which work exclusively within the Score Info dialog. The syntax for these is simply the command encased in a pair of backslashes.

Text wildcards are designed to appear on the page; as stated above, formatting wildcards (such as for bold, italic, new line etc) can only be used in Score Info.

Here is a list of the available text wildcards for Sibelius:

\$PARTNAME\ evaluates to a list of the instruments in the part, each instrument separated by a carriage return.
\$HEADERPARTNAME\ evaluates to a list of the instruments in the part, separated by a comma and all on the same line.
\$TITLE\
\$COMPOSER\
\$COPYRIGHT\
\$ARRANGER\
\$PUBLISHER\
\$ARTIST\
\$InstrumentChanges\
\$MOREINFO\
\$USER\ – current logged in user
\$DATELONG\ – full date in locale-specific format, e.g. “March 4, 2005”
\$DATESHORT\ – short date in locale-specific format, e.g. “04/03/05”
\$FILEPATH\ – full path to the current file
\$FILENAME\ – filename of the current file
\$FILEDATE\ – full date that the current file was last saved
\$TIME\ – current time (insert this, then zoom in and out every second!)
\$PAGENUM\ – current page number

\$YearOfComposition\
\$ComposerDates\
\$OpusNumber\
\$Subtitle\
\$Dedication\
\$Copyist\

\$NumPages\ – total number of pages (as of Sib 7.13)

Here are the available formatting wildcards for Score Info:

\n\ New line
\B\ Bold on
\b\ Bold off
\I\ Italic on
\i\ Italic off
\U\ Underline on
\u\ Underline off
\fArial Black\ Font change to Arial Black (for example)
\f_\ Font change to text style’s default font
\s123\ Size change to 123 (units are 1/32nds of a space, not points)

More information about Wildcards is available in the Sibelius Reference, starting on page 260.

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Future-Proofing Finale & Sibelius Notation: Considering MusicXML

A few days ago, I was received an email from fellow music engraver Andrei Pricope on an interesting topic – how can we future proof our  existing notation work in Finale and Sibelius? I found his observations insightful, and I thought I would share some of them here. (I’ve paraphrased in some places.) He writes:

“I am a long time Sibelius user, having invested hundreds of hours of my own engraving and thousands of dollars on out-sourced engraving projects. In addition, I have made a substantial investment in both hardware and music notation software.

Recent developments with Sibelius and now Finale signal that both are now at the whim of parent entities, their corporate visions, agendas, budgets and priorities; a situation less than ideal for our community and music-making at large; hence my deep concern about the long-term blind reliance on any particular music engraving solution.

In today’s rapid-changing technology environment, and with the recent dramatic and uncertain changes for both Sibelius and Finale I’ve recently adopted a new system of file archival:

In addition to saving my files in the current version of my notation program of choice, I plan to save and archive all of my music notation files using the MusicXML file format. A number of companies currently support MusicXML, and it meets several important criteria for longevity:

  • It is currently supported by a diverse group of music programs.
  • The file format is essentially ASCII text so MusicXML is platform and OS-version agnostic.
  • It is also fairly mature at this point, which means the files can be successfully imported / translated in the future, hopefully by a variety of programs that support music notation.

In summary, moving forward, I plan to archive my files in multiple formats: (1) The original Finale or Sibelius File (2) PDF files and (3) MusicXML format.”

Thanks, Andrei!

Note that while MusicXML is currently pretty robust, some musical symbols are not universal to all notation programs, and so MusicXML conversion will fail in these cases. An example between Finale and Sibelius are tremolos. Sibelius supports tremolos with up to 5 slashes, Finale supports tremolos only up to 3 slashes. If you save a MusicXML file from Sibelius with 4 and 5 slash tremolos, these trems will not be converted. When the file is imported into Finale there will be no tremolos in these locations.

Do you have any thoughts on ways to future proof your music notation work? Please leave a comment.