Category: Sibelius

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Increase cursor / mouse pointer visibility on Mac OSX and Windows 7

If you work on multiple monitors, or on a large monitor, you may find this tip for improving the visibility of the cursor to be helpful.

I often have more than one application open on my 30″ monitor, as I move between tasks throughout the day. On my setup, I sometimes lose track of the “Arrow” cursor, particularly when the mouse position drifts outside of the active program window. Additionally, certain applications have special cursors for specific operations which can be hard to see.  For instance, the notation program Finale has a “crosshairs” cursor for Speedy Entry that is easy to lose track of if you have a lot of screen real estate at a high resolution.

Fortunately, recent versions of both the Mac and Windows OS have a mechanism for increasing the mouse pointer / cursor visibility.

Mac: One the Mac, go to System Preferences… in the System row (4th row down), choose Universal Access, then click the Mouse tab at top of the dialog. Locate “For difficulties seeing the cursor” and move the slider to increase the cursor size.

Windows 7: Go to “Control Panel > Ease of Access >Ease of Access Center > Make the mouse easier to use”, and select one of the mouse pointer visibility choices.


(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)

Just changing the cursor settings slightly  can make a huge visibility difference. These are global settings, so you’ll be able to take advantage of them even when you are not working in your notation program.

robert

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Creating a New Score from Transposed Parts in Finale or Sibelius

Q: I’ve got a chart with just the parts and I’m re-constructing a score. I want to enter the notes as they are without going through transposing. Is there a way to just enter the notes onto a transposed score? It seems like there must be an easy way to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks . . .

A:  I’ll walk through the steps for creating a score from an existing set of printed parts in both Finale and Sibelius. You can create a new score from existing transposed parts in either program, but as you’ll see, one notation program has a clear advantage in this particular area.

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Sibelius 7 – the Power of Ideas

A few years ago, I created two special “Scratchpad” files, one for Finale (.mus) and one for Sibelius (.sib). It was a handy way to quickly copy and paste common notation building blocks which can take time to create, like drum set patterns, from one score into another.

The Ideas Library of Sibelius 7 offers a much better way to collect and organize these building blocks – and it’s integrated right into Sibelius. To start with, you have access to a large number of built-in musical motifs you can use to create new music (Preferences>Ideas>Show Built-in-ideas), and you can add and edit your own.

In this YouTube video from back in 2008, Daniel Spreadbury gives an excellent demonstration of the original “Ideas Hub”, as it was called when it was first introduced in Sibelius 5:

However, to this day, I’m surprised at how many Sibelius users think of the Ideas feature as nothing more than a “Musical Clip Art” feature – fun to play with, but not a tool for serious professional use.  You might be surprised to learn that the Sibelius Ideas feature is a powerful scratchpad that has the power to transform the way you work. Let’s take a closer look:

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Sibelius – How to type in Harp Pedal Markings As Text

Q: “In Sibelius, I have notated the starting and ending notes of a gliss which is in C minor. I tried the Add Harp Pedal Diagrams plugin, but since I’m not displaying enough pitches at this point in the score to outline the C minor tonality, I can’t get it to work. I would just  like to manually type in a harp pedal marking for C minor as text into Sibelius. How can I do this?”

A: To indicate the pedal changes at the start of a piece or new section, there are two standard conventions:

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Notating Fingered Tremolos in Finale and Sibelius

Fingered tremolo resembles a trill, but often with a larger interval between the fingers. The notation shows the tremolo marking between two notes rather than intersecting stems, or directly under or over a whole note. The convention is to show the full value of each of the notes in the tremolo pair.

Fingered tremolo is very straightforward to create in both Finale and Sibelius:

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Finale & Sibelius – controlling text visibility between score & parts

In observing the steps people go through to change visibility of text between score and parts in both Finale and Sibelius, I thought a short tutorial post on the subject might be helpful.

In both Finale and Sibelius, headers and other types of text are normally shared between the score and the parts, visible in both. The default setting in both programs is to show the text entered in the score in both score and parts.

It is a simple key shortcut to Show or Hide individual occurrences of text  as you edit each part (the keystroke toggles visibility in both programs):

  • Finale : CNTRL-ALT-SHIFT-H / windows • CMND-OPT-SHIFT-H / mac
  • Sibelius : CNTRL-SHIFT-H / windows • CMND-SHIFT-H / mac

… However, this is a lot of extra steps, particularly in an orchestral score with a lot of parts. It is much easier to do this in a single step for cases where you want the visibility of all the parts set the same way, and the score set a different way:

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