The Elbsound Music Fonts Package v1.11 is a free package with 25 music fonts for Finale, created by Jan Angermüller.
The package now includes four new music fonts for a total of 25, and has been updated with many improved symbols.
Sibelius Gap Before Bar & Brackets Appearing in Middle of Page
Q: I’m having some technical problems with a Sibelius score. I’m trying to reformat the score layout at the oboe section (pages 53-55). There is a weird thing where system brackets appear in middle of score instead of just at the left edge.
A: The brackets are caused by changing the amount of space before one or more bars. Sibelius calls this distance (normally zero) “Gap Before Bar” and it is useful to indent a the first system of a piece or movement or to create a space for a Coda in the middle of a system. Unfortunately, it is possible to add these gaps without realizing it.
In your example file, these Gaps Before Bar were a very, very small amount (.72 spaces), and if I had to guess, were very likely previously at system starts where they would be extremely hard to notice.
However, when you attempted to reformat the page layout, the “extra” brackets became visible since these bars were no longer at the starts of systems.
To correct this, select the individual bar following the mid-system bracket, then use the Inspector (Properties in Sibelius versions before v7) to reset the positioning for GAP BEFORE BAR to zero.
The bracket should disappear and now you can reformat the score without the mid-system brackets.
That’s all there is to it!
~robert
Instrument Group Names in Sibelius
…a tutorial for creating custom instrument group names in Finale is here.
There are some situations where you might need to show an additional label for a group of instruments in a score; to distinguish between different ensembles of like instruments or on stage or antiphonal instruments, for example:
One can achieve this in Sibelius by manually adding and placing text on each page of the score. However, this approach gets pretty tedious for large scores. The following technique is another method to help you achieve this look quickly and consistently.
John Hinchey’s Tips & Tricks for Sibelius on AvidBlogs
My friend and colleague John Hinchey recently wrote a series of tutorial posts for Sibelius over on Avid blogs. The title of the series is “Three Things” — There are actually four different articles in which he covers plugins, drumset notation, names and multi-rests, which I wanted to share here.
more >> “John Hinchey’s Tips & Tricks for Sibelius on AvidBlogs”
Behind-the-Scenes: The Music Font Comparison from Elbsound.studio
What is it ?
Music Font Comparison is an online A/B comparison of 150 music font families rendered using four musical examples. The font examples were created in a fully automatic font conversion process in Finale with a JW Lua plugin from a master document in Maestro font. No manual adjustments were made afterwards.
more >> “Behind-the-Scenes: The Music Font Comparison from Elbsound.studio”
Faking special stems in Sibelius
While working on a recent project I was faced with the challenge of recreating two varieties of custom stems. While Sibelius does offer a set of custom stems as symbols, the fact that these can not be attached to notes makes it difficult to work with them in practice. If there a lot of them in use, each one needs to be manually placed and, should anything change in the formatting, they easily slide around and need to constantly be checked. Plus the particular symbols I needed for this piece were not available.
The first type of stem basically has an “s” through it to signify a kind of exaggerated pitch fluctuation/vibrato. Here is a sample from the original manuscript:
Curated Plug-in sets: Installing the first plug-in
A Curated Plug-in Set is a collection of Sibelius plug-ins that can be installed at one time and run from a single location. These sets are described in the Of Note post Working sets, My Plugins, and Curated plug-ins in Sibelius.
In order to install a curated plug-in set, you will first need to install the downloadable plug-in Install New Plugin, which will be used to install other plugins.
Here are step-by-step instructions for installing Install New Plugin. There are different instructions for Sibelius 6 and for Sibelius 7 or later.
more >> “Curated Plug-in sets: Installing the first plug-in”