Sibelius Blog

Hypermusic Prologue revisited

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:31 +0000

A few months ago I posted a snippet of the manuscript for Hector Parra’s opera, Hypermusic Prologue. Here it is again:

Reader Ilja Panzer commented that he would love to see the equivalent passage in Sibelius. Copyist Katherine Anderson was happy to oblige; here it is:

To see the example above at a much larger size, click here.

This kind of complex, contemporary notation is a great advertisement both for the power and flexibility of Sibelius, and also for the skill and talent of engravers like Katherine. Thanks for sharing this with everybody, Katherine!

Changing music font in an existing score

Daniel Spreadbury — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:53:06 +0000

Movable music type (Courtesy hithro on Flickr)

One of the simplest ways to make your scores stand out from the crowd is to adjust the fonts used. Sibelius makes it really easy to change music fonts at any point in a project, and there are two ways to do it.

Edit All Fonts

The simplest way to change the music font used by your score is to choose House Style > Edit All Fonts, which shows this dialog:

Click the Main Music Font menu to see a list of all of the compatible music fonts you have installed on your computer. By default, you’ll see Opus, Inkpen2, Reprise and Helsinki, which are the four families of fonts that are supplied with Sibelius. If you have other compatible music fonts installed – such as Maestro, Petrucci, Sonata, and so on – these will also appear in the list. To change the music font, simply choose a different entry in the list, and click OK.

This is good, provided the music font you are changing to is of a similar character to the one you were already using. Changing, say, Opus to Helsinki in this manner works fine, but changing Opus to Inkpen2 doesn’t work so well. That’s because in order to look good, you may sometimes also need to adjust certain other aspects of your score’s appearance, which brings us to the other way of changing music font.

Importing a house style

When you want to make a radical change in the music font used in your score, e.g. going from an engraved appearance to a handwritten one, you should import a house style rather than simply using Edit All Fonts. That’s because house style libraries can change more than just the appearance of symbols like noteheads, clefs, accidentals, and so on: they can also change the thickness of lines, fonts used by various text styles, and other things that can have a subtle but important impact on how congruous the score as a whole appears.

To import a house style, choose House Style > Import House Style, which shows this dialog:

Choose a house style that includes the name of the music font you want to use, and click OK. You may need to go to Layout > Document Setup afterwards to check or reset the page and staff size afterwards.

What’s in a font?

You might be wondering what the differences are between the various music fonts supplied with Sibelius.

Opus is a modern engraved music font, which is used in most of Sibelius’s default manuscript papers and house styles. Helsinki is a more traditional, old-fashioned music font, with narrower, rounder noteheads (allowing slightly tighter spacing), and elegant, more ornate markings such as braces, trills, pedal lines, and so on.

Inkpen2 and Reprise, by contrast, are fonts that have the appearance of handwritten music. Inkpen2 looks as if it was drawn with a thick-nib ink pen (hence the name), while Reprise combines notes drawn with a thin-nib ink pen with Letraset-style stamps for titles and so on. (Trivia: Reprise is so named because it is similar in appearance to the old hand-copied parts used for Nelson Riddle’s arrangements for Frank Sinatra, whose record label, founded in 1960, was called Reprise.)

Careful use of music font can add an extra dimension to the presentation of your score. Experiment with different fonts to see which fonts you like best for which kinds of projects: you can always undo if you don’t like something you end up with!

Sibelius 6 is a Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence 2009 winner

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:00:17 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Sibelius 6 has been honoured by Tech & Learning magazine in their annual Awards of Excellence for 2009.

The Awards of Excellence recognise the best education technology products of the year, and Sibelius 6 has won in the category of Best Upgraded Products.

The complete list of winners is available at Tech & Learning’s web site, and a press release is also available (in PDF format).

Focus Set and Focus Families plug-ins make Focus on Staves more powerful

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:28:24 +0000

The Focus Families suite of plug-ins

I’ve written a number of posts about the cool plug-ins that are available for download from the Sibelius web site, and today I want to draw your attention to two more, written by plug-in king Bob Zawalich. These plug-ins make Sibelius’s Focus on Staves feature even more useful.

If you’re not familiar with Focus on Staves, it’s a way of hiding staves with music on them. This has two main uses: to hide staves for the purposes of playback (e.g. to hide a solo or improvised passage), or to hide staves inbetween the staves that you’re working on. Imagine that you’re working on a big orchestral score and you want to look at, say, the flute staff and the violin staves at the same time: unless you zoom out a long way, those staves are always going to be too far apart for you to see the music in detail. Enter Focus on Staves: simply choose the staves you want to focus on, and choose View > Focus on Staves (in the Layout menu in Sibelius 5, 4 and 3) to show only the selected staves.

Focus on Staves is a really useful tool as it stands, but imagine that you want to quickly switch between different sets of staves. That’s where Bob’s suite of plug-ins comes in handy, as we’ll see after the jump.

Focus Families

Focus Families is a set of plug-ins that allows you to focus quickly on all the staves in your score that are in a particular instrument family. Install the plug-ins into a sensibly-named folder – as you can see from the screenshot above, I chose to install them into a folder called Focus Families – and then simply choose the family of instruments you want to focus on, e.g. Focus Brass.

To switch between focusing on different families of instruments most quickly, assign keyboard shortcuts to these preset shortcuts:

Choose File > Preferences (in the Sibelius menu on Mac)
Go to the Menus and Shortcuts page
If you’re not already using your own custom feature set, choose Add feature set… from the drop-down at the top of the dialog; provide a name for your feature set, and make sure that Base on default set is switched on
From the Menu or category list, choose Plug-ins
Now choose one of the Focus Families plug-ins from the list, e.g. Focus Strings
Click Add… at the right-hand side to define a new keyboard shortcut
Type a suitable shortcut, and click OK.
Repeat the steps above to define shortcuts for the other plug-ins in the Focus Families set.
Click OK when you’re finished.

If you need to check which shortcuts you assigned in future, don’t forget that you can simply look in the Plug-ins menu, where the shortcuts are displayed.

You can also display multiple instrument families by running the plug-ins called Focus Families, Focus Families 2, or Focus Families 3, which will show the following dialog:

You can choose which families to display, and even switch on Do not show dialog again (this Sibelius session), which means you can run the plug-in to choose these families again without showing the dialog until you quit and restart Sibelius.

Focus Set

Focus Set is more special-purpose than Focus Families. Rather than automatically show just the staves in a particular family or families, Focus Set allows you to create up to 10 sets of staves that you can switch between quickly; and you can set up these focus sets for individual scores, making it simple to manage staves in each of your projects.

It is strongly recommended that you create keyboard shortcuts for the Focus Set 1, Focus Set 2 etc. plug-ins to make it quicker to switch between them. (Use the default shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F or Opt-Command-F to switch Focus on Staves off again afterwards.)

First, run Focus Set to create a focus set:

Click Create/Edit Focus Set… to create your first focus set.

Choose staves from the drop-down below Click in list to add staff to set, then give your focus set a name, and click Save.

You’re now returned to the main Focus Set dialog, where you’ll see your new focus set selected in the Available focus sets drop-down. Click Close to close the plug-in’s dialog, or Apply Focus Set to close the dialog and apply the chosen focus set.

Now you can use this focus set by choosing the Focus Set 1 plug-in, or assigning the keyboard shortcut you created for it.

If you need more help, a PDF containing more instructions is available inside the Focus Set download.

Do you have a favourite Sibelius plug-in? Feel free to suggest a plug-in for a tutorial.

Using Logic Pro’s virtual instruments with Sibelius 6

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:00:48 +0000

This tutorial was contributed by composer and Sibelius user Fritz Feger. If you would like to contribute a tutorial for the benefit of Sibelius users around the world, please get in touch.

Apple’s Logic Pro contains a number of high-quality virtual instruments and effects that can be instantiated only from directly within Logic itself, so you cannot add them directly to your playback configuration in Sibelius. Using Mac OS X’s built-in IAC buses, though, you can route MIDI from staves in Sibelius through to tracks in Logic that can host these instruments. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how.

Run Audio MIDI Setup from the Utilities folder inside Applications, then choose Window > Show MIDI Window if the MIDI window is not already visible.

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Double-click the IAC Driver device and switch on the Device is online checkbox in the dialog that appears, then click the + button to create a new IAC bus. Call it e.g. IAC Church Organ. (You can create as many buses as you like; each one has 16 MIDI Channels).

IAC Driver Properties" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Audio-MIDI-Setup-02-IAC-Driver-Properties.png" alt="Audio MIDI Setup 02 > IAC Driver Properties" width="490" height="520" />

Next you should restart Sibelius, if it is already running: Sibelius can only recognise a new bus when it scans the available playback devices at start-up. Then go to Play > Playback Devices and choose a custom playback configuration, if one is not already selected (you cannot change the devices used in the built-in playback configurations, so if you haven’t yet created a playback configuration of your own, click New to create one). Now activate IAC Church Organ; it should show up in the right-hand Active devices list. Be sure that the Sound set is set to General MIDI.

Playback Devices" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Sibelius-01-Playback-Devices.png" alt="Sibelius 01 > Playback Devices" width="500" height="328" />

Now go to the Manual Sound Sets page of the dialog, select IAC Church Organ from the Device list, switch on Use manual sound set, and set Number of channels to 16.

Manual Soundsets" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Sibelius-03-Manual-Soundsets.png" alt="Sibelius 03 > Manual Soundsets" width="500" height="328" />

When the setup in Logic is completed, we will return here to select program names that come closest to the sound you want to play back from Logic – you can also do this now, but then you won’t yet be able to test the sound. Don’t forget to press the Apply button after each selection! Then click Save, and you’re done in Sibelius for now.

Now open Logic (although Logic updates the IAC buses on the fly, so no problem if it is running already). In the Arrangement view (or wherever you want) of a blank project create (Opt-Command-N) 16 tracks with Software Instruments.

Create Tracks" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-01-Create-Tracks.png" alt="Logic 01 > Create Tracks" width="346" height="191" />

In the I/O section of each channel strip (for fastest input use the Mixer window), provide each channel with a software instrument of your choice, add effects, sends, whatever.

Mixer > Add instruments and Effects" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-03-Mixer-Add-instruments-and-Effects.png" alt="Logic 03 > Mixer > Add instruments and Effects" width="500" height="300" />

For my example maybe select for track 1 Garage Band > Church Organ, and in the Church Organ window which pops up select the first registration, namely Bass 1. For track 2, do the same but with Bass 2, then track 3 Flutes and so on. That’s easy. But now comes the tricky part.

Arrange > Instruments added + MIDI Channel selected" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-04-Arrange-Instruments-added-+-MIDI-Channel-selected.png" alt="Logic 04 > Arrange > Instruments added + MIDI Channel selected" width="500" height="233" />

Open the Environment window (I’ve been using Logic for years, and I have always avoided having to edit something there…). From the top left, choose All Objects from the dropdown list.

Environment > Default Setup, Text View" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-05-Environment-Default-Setup-Text-View.png" alt="Logic 05 > Environment > Default Setup, Text View" width="500" height="347" />

In the View menu, switch off Text so that you see the channel strips like in the Mixer window.

Environment > Default Setup, Graphic View" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-06-Environment-Default-Setup-Graphic-View.png" alt="Logic 06 > Environment > Default Setup, Graphic View" width="500" height="396" />

Drag the window big enough to have space for two new objects to create and to wire together.

From the New menu, choose Physical Input. You see an odd rectangle with tiny triangles at its right side and the names of all input devices available to Logic, among them your IAC Church Organ bus. Now, from the New menu, create a Channel Splitter and drag it to the right side of the Physical Inputs.

Environment > Channel Splitter created" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-09-Environment-Channel-Splitter-created.png" alt="Logic 09 > Environment > Channel Splitter created" width="500" height="396" />

Figure out which one of the the tiny triangles belongs to IAC Church Organ – if you can’t see, just count. The top triangle is always Sum. Or drag Physical Input big enough to see the lines from the names to the triangles. Then left-click that triangle and draw the wire to your Channel Splitter to connect them.

Environment > IAC Bus Wired to Channel Splitter" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-10-Environment-IAC-Bus-Wired-to-Channel-Splitter.png" alt="Logic 10 > Environment > IAC Bus Wired to Channel Splitter" width="500" height="396" />

The top triangle of the Channel Splitter is again Sum; don’t use it. The second triangle is assigned to channel 1 and so on. Now, again by clicking the respective triangle, wire channel 1 to the channel strip of channel 1, wire channel 2 of the Splitter to the strip of channel 2, and so on, until all 16 channels are wired.

Environment > wiring accomplished" src="http://www.sibeliusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Logic-14-Environment-wiring-accomplished.png" alt="Logic 14 > Environment > wiring accomplished" width="500" height="396" />

Now you can return to Sibelius. In the Mixer, you should now have the IAC Church Organ available in the Device drop-down list in addition to whichever other devices you have in your playback configuration; select it. Then, from the Sound ID dropdown list below, select something (which you have assigned on the Manual Sound Sets page of Play > Playback Devices). That’s it!

If you want to create more IAC buses, you don’t have to repeat all the Environment wiring stuff each time. Just save the file with a new name, go to the Environment window, select the cable which connects Physical Input and Channel Splitter, delete it, and plug in the new IAC bus that shows up in Physical Input. The wiring of the Channel Splitter to the 16 channel strips is universal. Then you can exchange the sound in each channel strip. I personally find it convenient to make a new Logic file for each IAC bus instead of making 32 or more sounds and multiple Channel Splitters in one file.

Fritz Feger (www.fritzfeger.de)

Designorati: “Sibelius 6 is close to perfect”

Daniel Spreadbury — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:11:08 +0000

Perfection (Courtesy unitopia on Flickr)

Designorati is an online publication for creative professionals in the fields of visual design (web design, typography, graphic design, illustration, and so on), written by a team of creative professionals who themselves have many years of experience. It’s somewhat unusual for the site to carry a review of music software, but I am delighted that founding editor Jeremy Schultz has reviewed Sibelius 6. He says:

I heard that Sibelius—now the industry standard—was owned by video powerhouse Avid and had just been updated to version 6. I use music in my multimedia work and so I was curious to see what Sibelius 6 can do for composers, and I came away with an unbelievable experience.

Jeremy was an Encore and Finale user in the late 1990s, but has been away from music notation software since that time. He concludes:

It is amazing how far music notation software has come since I used Encore and Finale in 1997. Encore is now owned by gvox and… Finale is still regularly updated and is probably Sibelius’ strongest competitor. However, I can only speak about my experience with Sibelius 6, which is exceptional. There are a few things I would suggest improving, mostly with little things like the audio exporting functions, but it is a phenomenal product for composers and also for music educators.

Read the whole review here.

Howard Goodall wins Emmy for soundtrack to Into The Storm

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:01:08 +0000

Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill

Composer and Sibelius and Pro Tools user Howard Goodall recently added an Emmy to his long list of accolades when his soundtrack for the joint BBC-HBO production Into The Storm picked up the award for Music Composition for a Mini series, Movie, or Special (Dramatic Score). The film, which first aired in the US at the end of May 2009 on HBO and will be screened in the UK on the BBC this autumn, continues the story begun in 2002’s The Gathering Storm, which detailed Europe’s descent into war in 1939. Into The Storm stars Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill, and “offers an intimate look at the making of a nation’s hero, whose prowess as a great wartime leader ultimately undermined his political career and threatened his marriage to his lifelong supporter, Clemmie.”

Many congratulations to Howard on another great success, following his Composer of the Year award at the Classical Brits earlier this year.

Love the one you’re with

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:00:34 +0000

What lies beneath the surface? (Courtesy linda yvonne on Flickr)

Ron Hess makes an interesting point in his latest article for online publication Film Music Magazine, entitled Finale vs. Sibelius: Another Perspective. If I may be so bold as to attempt a précis, it would be that users of notation software (and indeed of software in general) are too quick to look at the features of each new upgrade produced by software companies, and engage in high-level, often uninformed discourse about the capabilities of their chosen package versus its competitors, while at the same time displaying a complacency that prevents them from grasping its true “depth, redundant capacity, and retaskability and scriptability” of a tool that they may rely on, to a lesser or greater extent, to make their living.

It’s hard to disagree with this. I like to think that I’m better informed than most about the capabilities of both Sibelius and Finale, but of course in truth I am much better informed about Sibelius than I am about Finale (not least because I have had a hand in designing many of Sibelius’s features, whereas with Finale I am just another user). It’s very difficult to become virtuosic in two different tools that perform more or less the same job – indeed it’s rarely worth the effort – so it’s understandable that somebody who has scaled the learning curve of a piece of software should sit atop his plateau and cast stones at the folks likewise comfortable with their level of knowledge, without really having any depth of knowledge about those other hilltops.

Ron’s advice to re-examine your current working practices regularly is also undoubtedly wise: to an extent we rely on users’ willingness to do a little re-learning in each new version of Sibelius, as we often find that the best way to introduce some new functionality is to do it in such a way as to change something about a related (or even sometimes an unrelated feature). This might be as simple as a new feature stealing the keyboard shortcut of an existing feature, or a menu item changing name or moving to a different menu, or as complex as an existing feature being replaced wholesale by an entirely new way of doing the same thing plus more besides, with all the various stages inbetween. No decision to change an existing feature is taken lightly, but in the end we rely on users’ desire to work smarter and not harder, and take the brave choice to push forwards with a better solution rather than allow an existing poor one to ossify.

If you’ve been using Sibelius for years and you haven’t re-read (or even read once) the Sibelius Reference book, then you may be missing out on dozens of things that may have a dramatic impact on your facility with the software. If something feels clunky or slow, and you find yourself thinking, “There has to be a better way!”, chances are that there will be. Just ask the question!

Thanks, Ron, for the thought-provoking piece.

Doug Beavers on Sibelius: “It just feels right”

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:10:38 +0000

Back at the start of September, I posted about Grammy-winning composer, arranger and trombonist Doug Beavers making the switch to Sibelius from Finale. Doug recently posted a further update on how he’s finding Sibelius after doing his first real gig using his new software. It’s good news:

Despite a couple of blank moments where it’s just inevitable that I have to consult reference, the transition is invigorating and just feels “right”. No – I’m not working for Avid or anything, I just have to call it like I see it here as I’m sure that there are more folks in the same boat as I am.

Although Doug still finds Finale’s note input method more natural than Sibelius’s – no doubt because of the muscle memory that gets built up after extended use of a particular set of shortcuts – in all other respects he is finding that Sibelius has the advantage. Doug finds Sibelius’s handling of parts, playback, lyrics, and chord symbols streets ahead of the comparable tools in Finale. Check out everything he has to say.

Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds live tour scored in Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:24:08 +0000

The November issue of Music Tech magazine contains an article about the live tour of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, the seminal 1977 album that is as popular as ever some 30 years on. Sibelius played an important part in taking Jeff’s original handwritten scores and bringint them bang up to date. Speaking in the article, Jeff Wayne says:

“The first thing was to take the originals and create electronic versions of them. Sibelius has been invaluable for doing that both in the way it presents the score and in the functions that it has. It can take, in the case of The War of the Worlds, about a 100-minute score all in hand-written form and turn it into a beautiful-looking published score.”

Not only did Sibelius allow them to create beautiful new scores, but it also proved invaluable for creating the parts for each musician:

“And it’s not just good for scores – from each score you can create a part. With War of the Worlds, we’ve been the first to not tour with paper. We work with electronic readers that also have software which allows you to add things, whether it’s musician by musician or for me as the conductor. And Sibelius has the ability to go from its own software into the dedicated drivers that the readers require.”

Although Jeff prefers to compose away from the computer and orchestrate by hand, he finds that Sibelius allows him to create his finished parts quicker than ever:

“I was trained to orchestrate by hand, so I start sketching out my orchestrations then move into Sibelius. The inputting of all the parts and completing them is really speed by comparison.”

War Of The Worlds will be touring in 2010, so if you’d like to hear it live for yourself, book tickets now. And the November issue of Music Tech Magazine is on newstands now, or available for purchase online.

Sibelius Blog

Hypermusic Prologue revisited

Related posts:

Changing music font in an existing score

Edit All Fonts

Importing a house style

What’s in a font?

Related posts:

Sibelius 6 is a Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence 2009 winner

Related posts:

Focus Set and Focus Families plug-ins make Focus on Staves more powerful

Focus Families

Focus Set

Related posts:

Using Logic Pro’s virtual instruments with Sibelius 6

Related posts:

Designorati: “Sibelius 6 is close to perfect”

Related posts:

Howard Goodall wins Emmy for soundtrack to Into The Storm

Related posts:

Love the one you’re with

Related posts:

Doug Beavers on Sibelius: “It just feels right”

Related posts:

Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds live tour scored in Sibelius

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