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Create Custom Repeat Dots On 2 Line Staves in Sibelius 7 or Sibelius 6
A solution to this problem would be useful to many music educators, who often present introductory music in fewer than five-line staffs, but want to acquaint students with the conventional symbols like repeat signs.
A: In Finale, moving the repeat dot locations is a simple matter of adjusting the vertical location for available “Top Repeat Dot” and “Bottom Repeat Dot” parameters in Staff Setup. However, while the method to achieve this in Sibelius is somewhat more circuitous, it is indeed quite possible, and in fact, once you’ve created the mechanism once, it is very fast to create in subsequent worksheets or even scores, via Export / Import House Style.
The workaround uses a pair of staves which have been dragged directly on top of one another; one staff displays the 2 staff lines and the notation, the other displays only the barlines.
Start by making a duplicate of the ”Percussion [2 lines]” instrument. This will be the same as the regular ”Percussion [2 lines]” instrument, with one crucial difference. We are going to hide its barlines.
Go into Edit Instruments, select “Percussion [2 lines] and then click the “New Instrument…” button. A dialog will pop up, asking you “Are you sure you want to create a new instrument based on “Percussion [2 lines]?” Click yes.
(You can also optionally force the initial barline at the left edge of the score to break at this location by unchecking “Initial barline” here.)
Next, we want to create an “overlay staff instrument” which will have nothing *but* the barlines and special barlines visible. Create a duplicate of the “Percussion [1 line]” instrument. Go into Edit Instruments, select “Percussion [1 line] and then click the “New Instrument…” button. A dialog will pop up, asking you “Are you sure you want to create a new instrument based on “Percussion [1 line]?” Click yes.
When the New Instrument dialog comes up, name it appropriately. I used “RPM [1 line, barlines only]“. Now, click the “Edit Staff Type” button. When the dialog opens, click the General button at the top and set the number of staff lines to zero. Make sure all of the checkboxes in the “Other Objects” section are unchecked. Now, set both of the “Extend” text fields in the Barlines section to “1″. Leave the “Initial barline” and “Barlines” checkboxes checked.
Next, select the Notes and Rests tab. In this dialog, locate the “Note Properties” section, and uncheck “Rhythms (stems, dots, ties, rests, etc.)” and also “Bar rests”. Actually, it’s ok to uncheck everything in the Note Properties section. The only thing we want to show in our modified 1-line staff are the single barlines, special barlines like the repeats, and the final barline. OK the “Staff Type” dialog, and then the “Edit Instrument” dialog.
(The hard work is done. At this point, you can save your worksheet example file as a Manuscript Paper, or export these new Instrument definitions in a House Style, so you can bring them into other documents quickly.)
Add these two new instruments to your worksheet, with the ”Percussion [2 lines, no barlines]” above the ”Perc [2 line repeat source]“. OK the dialog.
You’ll want to enter music into the 2 – line staff before doing the next step, to avoid entering music into an “invisible” staff.
Finally, after entering the notation, drag your “1 staff, barlines only” staff right up inside the modified 2-line percussion staff until it won’t move any further north. It will be aligned correctly. Again, it’s important to wait until the note entry is completed before overlaying the barlines staff, otherwise, you’ll be entering invisible notes in an invisible staff!
One advantage of this method over using font characters or symbols to achieve this graphically, is that your file will play back correctly, with repeats.
That’s it! That’s all there is to it.
for Anne Carley
Keep it Together in Finale or Sibelius : Score & Parts in the same file
In the early days of Finale and Sibelius, individual parts were generated from a master score via a painful and aptly named process referred to as “Extraction”. The programs would dutifully export twenty or thirty cryptically named parts files onto your Desktop which would then need to be cleaned up and individually prepared for printing. Any subsequent changes to the score *also* required edits to one or more (or all) respective parts.
Today, parts are integrated within the score and the content is intelligently married. Sibelius calls its parts integration feature “Dynamic Parts“, while Finale labels their feature “Linked Parts“. In general, having scores and parts linked in one master file has proven to be a godsend, but there are some caveats.
Woodwind and brass instruments aren’t polyphonic. With some notable quality control exceptions in currently published music, common practice is to have one instrument per staff in the parts. Ideally, woodwind and brass players should not be required to locate their lines from within a divisi part.
At the same time, the better organized an orchestral score is, the more readable it becomes. Generally scores with fewer systems are easier to read. Quite often, the requirement is for pairs of instruments appearing on a single staff wherever possible: Clarinet 1 and 2 on a single staff, Horn 1 and 3 on a single staff and so on. For this tutorial, we’ll start with divisi or chorded staves in the score, and create individual parts from these.
Let’s take a look at how each program currently integrates score and parts, and some ways we can make Finale and Sibelius best work to our advantage despite any limitations.
Aleatoric Elements : From Boxed to Out of the Box Notation In Finale
Music that supplies only the pitches while directing the players to improvise the rhythms freely is a common (partly) aleatoric device which gives the composer a desired degree of control over the tonality, while retaining temporal freedom.
The notation is typically indicated by surrounding a series of specific pitches with a square or rectangular box, along with a box extender line to indicate that the pitches are to be improvised on for a specific number of beats or a given number of seconds. The exact duration of the “box” can also be indicated as a text duration (e.g. 00:06″ etc).
In ”Creating Aleatoric / Temporal Boxed Notation in Finale, Part 1” we looked at how to create these semi-aleatoric directives.
Sometimes, the reverse is desired: the rhythm is notated, but the specific pitches are left up to the player. A common convention for this is to show stems of different lengths (without noteheads) to show the relative pitch relationships:
This is quite simple to do in Finale:
Dolet 6 Music XML Plugins for Finale & Sibelius are now Freeware
Yup, that’s right: Just in time for Christmas, MakeMusic is offering the Dolet 6 Music XML plugin for both Finale and Sibelius on their website as a free download. Here’s the link:
http://www.makemusic.com/Products/MusicXML.aspx
Cool, right? But wait, what is a Sibelius plugin doing on the Finale website?
In case you missed the official announcement, on November 2, 2011, MakeMusic entered into an agreement to acquire selected assets of Recordare® LLC, the Internet music publishing and software company.
Under the terms of the agreement, MakeMusic purchased the MusicXML™ open format and Dolet® software technology, including copyrights, source code, and trademarks. MakeMusic also announced that the founder of Recordare and inventor of MusicXML, Michael Good, would join MakeMusic as the Director of Digital Sheet Music.
In case you want to read the official MakeMusic press releases, here they are:
Additionally, the Recordare site has more information about the future of Music XML.
Both Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 already have decent Music XML integration built in, allowing you to import and export Music XML files for collaboration with others, or, in the case of Finale, for back saving to a previous version of Finale.
The Dolet 6 plugins use the latest Music XML 3.0 technology, with support for additional musical symbols and lots of other goodies, so even Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 users will benefit. And, if you are using and earlier version of your notation software, such as Finale 2010 or Sibelius 6, it’s a huge step up, essentially giving users a comprehensive file exchange feature.
robert
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.
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:
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:
Comparing Finale and Sibelius
Q: Which program is faster / simpler for jazz lead sheets – Finale or Sibelius? Also, which program is better at complex chord extensions and chord placement?
A: In order to really determine which program is “faster”, I think it is necessary to look at four main areas of interaction: Document Setup, Note Entry, Page Layout and Editing.