In Sibelius, it’s easy to change the rehearsal mark format from letters to numbers or to bar numbers. And, with either rehearsal letters or numbers, you can also create individual rehearsal marks that do not follow the current sequence, or start a new sequence. Let’s take a look.
1. Creating rehearsal marks
Select the place in the score, where you want the rehearsal mark to appear and click the “Rehearsal Marks“ button on the Text tab (or simply use the shortcut ⌘R (Mac) or Ctrl+R (Windows):
2. Changing the format of rehearsal marks
You can change the format of rehearsal marks from within Engraving Rules, found in the House Style group of the Appearance tab.
When the dialog opens, locate Rehearsal Marks in the left pane, then choose the appearance you would like for them. You can, for example, choose “Bar number“:
You can also get to the Rehearsal Marks Engraving Rule directly, by navigating to the Rehearsal Marks Group of the Text Tab, and selecting the little box in the lower right corner:
This brings up the Engraving Rules with the Rehearsal Marks pane already selected for you:
3. Creating “custom” rehearsal marks which are not consecutive
Sibelius automatically creates rehearsal marks in consecutive order, automatically reordering these if you subsequently delete or insert individual rehearsal marks. However, if you want to create a rehearsal mark outside this sequence, you can do it here:
To allow sequences such as A + A1…
Note: the consecutive rehearsal mark for the above example is “B1”. So if you want to go back to your original alphabetical A-Z-sequence following “A1”, start a new sequence with “B” (no suffix) and check New prefix / suffix again to clear the previous settings.
A German version of this post („Studierzeichen”) is available here.
Karin Vadon is a classically trained musician, singer-songwriter and music copyist from Vienna, Austria who authors a german-language music notation blog for Sibelius and Dorico users.
Thank you for sharing!
Hi Karin,
I’m creating a single part (trumpet) in Sibelius Ultimate that uses letter rehearsal marks in the first section and numbered rehearsal marks (not bar numbers) for the remainder of the part. So far it appears that Sibelius will only allow me to do one or the other, not both. If I change from letters to numbers or vice versa in Engraving Rules, it changes all the rehearsal marks to numbers or letters. I want to have the letters A through P and the numbers 1 through 212 in the part. I could create separate files for the different sections, but prefer to have it all in one file. Do you have a solution? Thanks!
—
Bruce
Hi Bruce,
Have you tried using Right-Click > Text > Special Text > Rehearsal Marks instead of the auto-insert Rehearsal Marks button in the ribbon? That way, you can use custom rehearsal marks regardless of the sequence Sibelius has calculated. (I often use them to include markings like [V1], [Ch], [V2], [Ch], etc. – for Verse 1, Chorus, and so on – in pop charts.)
If I were in your shoes, I would set the Rehearsal Marks section of the Engraving Rules settings to ‘numbers’, and use the auto-insert Rehearsal Marks button for the bulk of the part (as there are over 200 of the numbered rehearsal marks to add – doing them all by right-click could get a bit tedious!). Then I would go back to the start, and insert the first twenty-odd rehearsal marks manually, using the Text menu on the Right-Click.
Sorry for jumping in on someone else’s post, but I hope that helps?