… music notation tips & tutorials by experts in this field.
Q: How do I record Key Switches and Continuous Controller data into Sibelius?
I built a “Frankenstein”; using a fixedIP address I hooked a PC (slave) to a Mac which works very nicely. I use VEPro 5 server but mainly using EW Symphonic Orchestra Gold.
I saw a video on YouTube where the composer added staves to play those key switch notes and hid them, but it was not very clear. Can you explain what was done?
There are about 650 published Sibelius plug-ins, of which 150 ship with Sibelius. A lot of people never use plug-ins. They can’t find them, or can’t install downloadable plug-ins, or can’t figure out which plug-in does what. This is unfortunate, because plug-ins could save them a lot of work.
A Working Set of Plug-ins
In Sibelius, plug-ins are organized by category and you run them by finding their names on a menu or by using a keyboard shortcut.
As an alternative, you can create a set of favorite plug-ins that you identify by name and find in the same place. I call this a working set. The plug-ins in the working set should be ones you use often and will be easily available when you need them.
A curated plug-in set is a working set of plug-ins chosen for certain groups of users. It can be based on instruments, such as harp or guitar, or it can be created for a specific project or a school class. A set consists of a zip file containing a text file of plug-in names that make up the set and a folder of downloaded plug-in files which will be installed on your machine.
The files needed to create a curated plugin set can be provided by a plug-in curator, who is an experienced Sibelius user who selects a set of plug-ins that would be useful. This could be a teacher, or a co-worker, or anyone else you trust who is comfortable choosing plug-ins.
more >> “Working sets, My Plugins, and Curated plug-ins in Sibelius”
Since Sibelius version 1, plug-ins have been able to run other plug-ins. For example, the Proof-read plug-in is just a container that lets you call the main Run() method of the plug-ins Check Pizzicatos, Check Clefs,… so you can do all your proofreading at once. These plug-ins were designed to be called by other plug-ins, and typically do not display a dialog when they run.
.
This document will discuss plug-ins that call the top-level Run() method of other plug-ins, which is equivalent to running the plugin from the plug-in menu.
If you have multiple copies of a plugin in different locations (typically a downloadable plugin you have forgotten about installing, and so you installed it again to a different location), you may not be running the copy of the plugin you expect. This is true even if you explicitly run it from one of the plugin menus (or in Sibelius 6 and earlier, from the single plugin menu).
If the plugin files are identical it doesn’t matter which copy is run, but you may have installed an update which has different code, and you will find that you are not seeing the effects of the change.
Q: I am studying the commercial template you created for Cinesamples and was wondering how you created those new tuplets in the Articulation part in the Engraving Rules in the Sibelius version of the template?
A: Sibelius has three user definable slots in the Articulations section of Edit Symbols (first two shown):
These correspond to the Custom Articulations 1, 2 and 3 in the fourth keypad in Sibelius, and show up in Engraving Rules > Articulations once defined.
Hi Robert,
A quick question: A student of mine was told that seeing each 16th note in bar like the attached pic is clear:
My proposed solution was to use fewer 16th notes and rests for the same effect, e.g. an 8th with a staccato dot plus 16th rest and 16th note, all beamed together:
What’s your take on this? Thanks much.
Patrick
What are plugins and how do I run them?
In Sibelius, plug-ins are extra features created using a programming language called ManuScript. Sibelius ships with about 150 plug-ins. These plug-ins are documented in the Sibelius Reference. Plug-ins can do many of the same things that built-in Sibelius commands do.