… music notation tips & tutorials by experts in this field.
Harp pedal diagrams in Sibelius can be entered using several methods. For instance, as shown in this blog post, you can manually enter a harp pedal diagram using 4 regular text characters (LMNO), then change the font to Opus Text.
There are also a growing number of harp support plugins for Sibelius to automate the process of creating harp pedaling notation (and playback), as outlined in this article by Bob Zawalich on the Sibeliusblog.
A few days ago a composer contacted me to ask how to create a score which did not show either time signatures or bar lines in Sibelius.
One of the features lacking even in the latest version of Sibelius are straight lines which snap-to notes. All of the straight lines, including the gliss lines, attach to the staff, and actually don’t snap to noteheads. The gliss lines and other straight lines do play back in Sibelius, but they are fussy to position correctly between notes.
Bob Zawalich’s excellent and highly recommended “Lines Between Notes” plugin for Sibelius takes a great deal of the work out of positioning lines between notes accurately; indispensable if you write a lot of music with gliss lines, for instance.
The “Lines Between Notes” plugin is an amazing productivity tool, but it’s not a “dynamic” solution. If you apply the plugin in a concert score you’ll most likely have to make a second adjustment in the part if it transposes. If you change the start or ending note pitch after the fact, you’ll have the run the plugin again. A way to create a real, honest-to-goodness straight, note-attached lines would be a useful feature.
more >> “Use Slurs to Create Straight, Note-attached Lines in Sibelius”
Some Sibelius plugins (for example, Respell Sharps as Flats) run without taking any input from a user. They do not display a dialog, but just run and do what they were designed to do.
Other plugins take input from users by putting up a dialog box that has boxes to type into, or check boxes, list boxes, or radio buttons. You might see a dialog that looks like this:
In this dialog there is a great deal of data, but the initial values in the edit boxes will change every time the plugin is run, because they are pulled out of the current score. The plugin does not save anything from the previous run, but instead always starts fresh.
Other plugins, however, remember what a user typed in the last time the plugin was run, assuming that the same settings might be used again. Here are some different ways plugins can save these settings.
more >> “How Sibelius Plugins Store their Settings for User Data”
Q: I’m writing a piece with semi-quaver runs full of accidentals. The finished score shows the note heads crammed together with the accidentals and it’s not readable. The bar won’t increase its width to properly display everything. Is there a way for me to make the bar wider so everything in it would fit and not be crammed up?
To apply standard Note Spacing on Mac, select a passage and then type CMND-SHIFT-N. To apply standard Note Spacing on Windows: CONTROL-SHIFT-N
A: Assuming you have already run Note Spacing on the score, if it is ok for your score layout to change, the most straightforward method to increase space is to select the region in question, unlock the systems up to the next major event (e.g. rehearsal letter, key change etc.) and reapply note spacing to increase the spacing between the notes. in the selected region.
To spread out a passage of music on Windows, select the passage and type
SHIFT+ALT+ → a few times. On Mac, SHIFT+OPTION+ → spreads the passage out. You can also hold down Ctrl (Windows) or CMND (Mac) at the same time to move in bigger steps. You can make make a selected passage narrower by using the left arrow rather than the right arrow, e.g. Shift+Alt+ ←
more >> “Sibelius Quick Tip to Widen or Squash Note Spacing”
The Finale Copyist Text, Broadway Copyist Text and Jazz Text fonts by MakeMusic work with a variety of music scoring programs, including Finale and Sibelius. These fonts include the ability to surround text with handwritten looking boxes. To do this, special enclosure characters are available as part of the character set; a nice touch.
(use the regular, not extended versions of these music text fonts for this).
Finale Copyist Text and Broadway Copyist Text have a cool preassembled box which works really great with single numbers or letters. Simply type the tilde ~ character first, followed by a single digit or letter. They look like this:
For longer text strings, you could use standard open and closed bracket shapes. The main bracket shapes [ and ] produce just what you would expect. Shift-Open-Bracket and Shift-Closed-Bracket { and } produce a wider version of the open and closed bracket character.
However, if you just type either lower case or shifted open bracket followed by two or more letters or numbers and a closed bracket, you’ll see a separation of the enclosure:
more >> “Boxing Clever : Handwritten Font Enclosures for Music Notation”
Hi Robert,
I’m working on a composition of a 17 year old student for their final exams at the end of high school. He has written a drum part which requires samples as well as drum kit.
These samples are notated as diamond noteheads on his score:
However, when I export the midi file to to Logic, I lose all these diamond headed notes.
So, I created a second version of his score (Liam Comp 2.sib), where I managed to copy these diamond noteheads into a new staff. However, when I try to play these back – nothing (whether the new instrument is drum set or piano).
Are you able to see why these notes on the score do not appear to be registering as midi messages on playback and export?
Please help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope.
Thanks very much,
Derek