Sibelius Blog

PC Pro says Sibelius First “hits all the right notes”

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:39:20 +0000

The March 2010 issue of PC Pro magazine here in the UK carries a positive review of the new version of Sibelius First, and I’m delighted to say that reviewer Ben Pitt has bestowed the software with a PC Pro Recommended award.

Giving Sibelius First the maximum rating of six stars for value for money, Ben says:

There’s little to criticise about this package. That it’s based on such a sophisticated application certainly helps, but just as impressive is how it meets the needs of potential buyers. While it won’t cut the mustard for professionals, by and large it caters amply for composers and arrangers producing conventional scores for small and medium-sized ensembles.

The inclusion of Sibelius 6’s revolutionary Magnetic Layout feature is a key point in Sibelius First’s favour:

It excels at handling page layouts, giving lots of space for complicated passages and adjusting everything to fill pages neatly… [Magnetic Layout] ensures automatic formatting of scores is extremely reliable and, for the rare occasions when the layout could be better, simply dragging objects with the mouse provides a quick fix.

Ben draws attention to some of the limitations that Sibelius First has relative to the full Sibelius 6 program (in particular, early music note durations, Panorama view, cue notes, and the limit of 16 staves per system), but in the end he concludes:

It isn’t as flexible as the full version but the interface and the quality of the results are just as elegant, and at this price it may even encourage some creativity that would otherwise have gone untapped.

If you haven’t checked out Sibelius First yet, you can try out a fully-functional 30-day trial of the product that PC Pro says is “cut-price but not light on features” from the Sibelius web site.

The March 2010 issue of PC Pro magazine is on newsstands now!

Sibelius and Pro Tools come together in “The Fire and the Flood”

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:10:07 +0000

My pal John Hinchey was kind enough to send me a copy of Leticia Wolf’s new album, The Fire and the Flood, which is available now on iTunes. Among his many talents, John is a brass and string arranger extraordinaire, and worked on four songs on Leticia’s new album, including Comfortable in Hell, which eagle-eared listeners may recognise from the ReWire example video on the Sibelius web site.

John was brought onto this project by his collaborator Mark Hornsby, who produced the album. John and Mark made extensive use both of Sibelius and Pro Tools in putting together the final mixes.

“There are four songs with my string arrangements,” John told me. “We recorded string quintet on It’s Fine, The Clue, Dig, and – of course – Comfortable In Hell. I also did an arrangement for three euphoniums and tuba on The Flood.”

John relied on the ReWire feature in Sibelius 6 to make the demos of his arrangements really pop. “It was incredibly helpful on this project. Being able to create good demos for a client is always important, but when you are trying to convince a producer that using three euphoniums and a tuba on a alternative rock track is a good idea… a great demo is crucial!”

Mark, of course, decided to go with the unusual brass combination in the end, and John is delighted with how the final album sounds.

“I’m really tickled with the mix. Mark used only room sound on the strings and brass, no digital reverb. It really brings them to the front and makes for a transparent mix.”

“The album was recorded and mixed in Pro Tools HD,” Mark added. “The vibe of the album was intended to be dry, intimate, and organic. No reverb was used for ambience – just room mics from the tracking sessions. I used IK Multimedia’s T-Racks, Chandler/Abbey Road’s TG Limiter and Massenburg Design Works’s EQ3. This achieved a very warm yet clean sound.”

As for Leticia herself, she has described the album as “a coming of age record”:

There are songs about letting go of the impossible, and songs that revisit the painful. It’s got classic whiskey and cheating tunes, but I tried to make it more than that. It’s about learning how to dream the right dreams, and hold on to them. The album is dark, but it’s soft and delicate, even hopeful at times. The stories explore a meandering path that is green with acoustic guitar, piano, rhodes, organ, strings and even a few euphoniums. The production is dry, warm and at times playful, but never over-done.

The album is definitely worth a listen. Check it out on iTunes today.

NumPad 3.0 for iPhone supports all six Sibelius Keypad layouts

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:56:25 +0000

Back in November of last year, I blogged about edovia’s NumPad 2.0 app for iPhone, which included a dedicated Sibelius Keypad layout. This morning I received another email from developer Luc Vandal to let me know that NumPad 3.0 has just been released on the App Store, and the support for Sibelius has been further improved in this version with the addition of the other five Keypad layouts. So you can now access all of Sibelius’s note input features directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

It works really well in practice: you can swipe your finger from side to side to change Keypad layouts, and the on-screen Keypad in Sibelius keeps up. You can even run NumPad with your iPhone or iPod Touch plugged into your Mac or PC via USB, and if you find the USB cable gets in the way, you can rotate the iPhone through 180 degrees so that the USB cable comes out of the top of the device rather than the bottom.

If you have a laptop, or perhaps one of those new-fangled wireless Mac keyboards without a numeric keypad, NumPad 3.0 could represent a substantial improvement in your productivity, and at $2.99 in the US App Store (£1.19 in the UK App Store) it won’t break the bank.

Introducing a new way to buy Sibelius products

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:39:52 +0000

A shopping trolley on a laptop, yesterday. (Courtesy alles-schlumpf on Flickr)

It has always been possible to buy Sibelius from our network of expert distributors and resellers around the world, and in select countries (namely the UK, US and Australia) it has also been possible to buy some of our products directly from the Sibelius web site.

Today marks the start of an exciting new era, as the Sibelius web store has been closed (goodbye, old friend!) and a shiny new replacement has been unveiled in the form of the new Avid online superstore. Now you can shop for Sibelius products together with Avid’s other audio and video products from a single online storefront, and from pretty much any country.

In addition to being able to buy boxed versions of Sibelius that are shipped out to you on DVD-ROM in sturdy yet attractive cardboard boxes, you can also now purchase new copies and upgrades for Sibelius for immediate download, so you can scratch that music notation itch within minutes (well, hours – the Sibelius download is pretty big) rather than days.

A word to the wise: if you are going to purchase an upgrade online at the new Avid superstore, beware that you will see all of the various upgrade types available for purchase (e.g. educational, professional, competitive crossgrade, etc.). Make sure you choose the correct upgrade type for your current license of Sibelius, otherwise you may end up with an upgrade you can’t use. To check which upgrade you should buy, use the handy upgrade eligibility tool.

The new Avid superstore carries a full range of products for individual customers, but if you represent a school, college, university or other institution, you should continue to contact a reseller or us directly for pricing for site licenses and other multi-user installations.

Happy shopping!

Human Target scores direct hit with orchestral soundtrack

Daniel Spreadbury — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:54:15 +0000

Fox Television's latest hit, Human Target

In these days of low budgets and high technology, it’s unusual for a weekly episodic television show to have an orchestral soundtrack performed by a live orchestra. For many years, the only show in Hollywood to feature a live orchestral score every week was The Simpsons, composed and orchestrated by Sibelius user Alf Clausen. Though there are exceptions – such as ABC’s Lost, composed by another Sibelius user, Michael Giacchino, and Fox’s Family Guy, both of which often use orchestras of 35 players – other shows tend to make do with sampled orchestras, occasionally augmented by a small number of live players to give the synthetic sound a little colour.

But this January, Fox Television launched a new weekly action drama called Human Target, and it breaks the mould: every week it features a score performed by a big orchestra, sometimes with as many as 60 players. It’s a welcome throwback, and gives the show a unique, lush sound.

After the break, read more about this new show, its music, and the men behind it.

Human Target is adapted from a comic book series of the same name, created by Len Wein and Carmine Infantino and published by DC Comics. Both the comic and the TV series based on the comic centre around a man named Christopher Chance who is the titular human target: when a client is in danger, private security guard Chance assumes a new identity and gets as close as possible to the client in question, drawing out the villain and saving the day in dramatic style.

As a TV show, Human Target is a knowing, over-the-top, bombastic hour of snappy dialog, intrigue, exciting stunts, and – unusually – great orchestral music.

The composer on Human Target is Bear McCreary, one of Hollywood’s fastest rising composers. McCreary came to prominence thanks to his score for Ron Moore’s re-imagining of 1970s space series Battlestar Galactica, and has also provided music for series such as Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, NBC’s Trauma, and for video games such as Dark Void. Still aged just 31, McCreary has already made a tremendous career for himself. Naturally, McCreary is a Sibelius user: he says, “I write in Digital Performer and orchestrate in Sibelius.”

On Human Target, McCreary is working with copyist Jonathan Beard and orchestrator Henri Wilkinson to write a fresh new score every week, with sometimes as many of 33 of the show’s 42 minute running time requiring musical backing.

McCreary blogs in great detail about the music for each episode of each show that he writes, and his post about the pilot of Human Target is no exception. Here’s the melody of the main theme of the show, from McCreary’s site:

And here’s how this theme sounds in the actual opening titles:

The cues for the show are recorded every week on the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers’ studio in Burbank, California. Jonah Welland of Comic Book Resources got an invitation to visit the scoring stage to watch a recording in process, describing a brass section recording session. It’s a great read and provides some insight into how a day on a scoring stage really works.

The third episode of Human Target aired this past Wednesday, and McCreary has once again updated his blog with a detailed look behind the scenes of how the music for the show was put together. Check it out, especially the video blog that shows scenes from the recording session for the episode.

Human Target airs on Wednesday nights on Fox in the US, and is expected to air in other markets later in 2010.

Sibelius goes coast to coast on the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:00:35 +0000

Brian Rothschild, Yoko Ono, Jackson Browne and Quincy Jones on stage at NAMM 2010

One of the charitable organisations that Sibelius, and now Avid, has always been proud to support is the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, which travels around the United States providing opportunities to children all over the country to get their hands on some seriously cool kit for media creation.

Along with stations running Sibelius and Pro Tools HD, this year the bus also has stations running Avid’s flagship video editing software, Media Composer, allowing the kids lucky enough to get to create their own project on the bus the chance to use the same tools that the professionals in the fields of music, production and video use every day.

My colleague Taryn Unruh was at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California a couple of weeks ago at which the new 2010 version of the bus was unveiled. As you can see from the photo above, Avid is in excellent company in sponsoring this project!

The making of Pat Metheny’s “Orchestrion”

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:36:04 +0000

Just before Christmas, I posted about the sleeve art for guitarist, composer and Sibelius user Pat Metheny’s new album, Orchestrion, which features a Sibelius 6 box lurking amidst the huge variety of musical instruments that cram the picture. (If you look really closely you can see Pat himself at the left-hand side, hiding behind his guitar!)

Of course, what’s really interesting about the sleeve art for Orchestrion is not that it features a Sibelius box, but rather that all of the instruments shown on the cover can be controlled remotely by Metheny using his guitar: the real orchestrion of the title.

The YouTube video embedded above is a look behind the scenes at how Orchestrion was put together, and just how incredible the performance of the robot-controlled instruments, created by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) really is. Amazing stuff.

Orchestrion is released today on Nonesuch.

Composer Ellen Zwilich on how technology benefits musicians

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:01:12 +0000

Composer Ellen Zwilich (courtesy Greg Stepanich & The Palm Beach Arts Paper)

The Palm Beach Arts Paper recently ran a profile of Pulitzer-prize winning composer and Sibelius user Ellen Zwilich, in advance of the Florida premiere of her acclaimed Septet for piano trio and string quartet (2009).

As the article says:

Zwilich, 70, is a native South Floridian and one of the most honored American composers of our time. The first woman to earn a doctorate in composition at the Juilliard School, she was also the first woman composer to win a Pulitzer (for her First Symphony, in 1983).

On the march of technology and its impact on musicians, composers and consumers of music, Ellen says:

“I think we’re at the dawn of something very, very interesting. We’ve got to get a number of things right at this point. You look back at the history of the player piano, or the disc recording, and it was always going to be the end of music, and it never did anything but open things up.

“I’m not one of the doomsayers, ” said Zwilich, who does all her composing, even sketching, using the Sibelius music software program. “Every technological advance that people have gotten very upset about turned out so much better than they anticipated,” she said. “Of course, the problem with the Internet, which I happen to love, is that you really have to know what you’re looking at.”

Check out the profile in full, and in particular the recommended listening links at the bottom of the profile to familiarise yourself with the music of Ellen Zwilich.

Unleash the power of text wildcards

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:00:36 +0000

Sibelius includes some simple but powerful features for working with text wildcards. Wildcards are text tokens that are automatically substituted with text from elsewhere. They’re useful for situations where you want the same information to be shown in lots of different places, allowing you to change that information once and have it updated automatically everywhere else; and they’re also useful for showing different information in the same place automatically.

(Fun fact: in the Italian-language version of Sibelius, wildcards are called “jolly”, which is the Italian word for “joker”, as in the playing card!)

After the jump, learn some techniques for using wildcards to their best advantage.

How wildcards work

In Sibelius, a wildcard is simply entered in text. Wildcards are things like \$Title\, which corresponds to the Title field in File > Score Info. When you’re editing the text, and the cursor is flashing, you see the wildcard itself: when you stop editing the text, the wildcard is replaced with the value to which the wildcard refers, which might be information from Score Info, the page number, the current date, your username, and so on.

Try this out: in any score, type Ctrl+T or Command-T to create some Technique text, then type:

My name is \$User\ and it is now \$Time\ on \$DateLong\

then hit Esc. Cool, huh?

What wildcards are there?

Most of the fields in File > Score Info can be used as wildcards, including:

\$Title\
\$Subtitle\
\$Composer\
\$Arranger\
\$Artist\
\$Copyright\
\$PartName\
\$InstrumentChanges\
\$Lyricist\
\$Copyist\
\$Publisher\
\$Dedication\
\$OpusNumber\
\$ComposerDates\
\$YearOfComposition\
\$MoreInfo\

There is also a bunch of other wildcards for useful things like the time and date:

\$DateShort\: the current short date in the format chosen by your operating system’s regional settings (e.g. dd:mm:yyyy)
\$DateLong\: the current long date in the format chosen by your operating system’s regional settings (e.g. dd MMMM yyyy)
\$Time\: the current time in the forma thh:mm:ss (24hour)
\$User\: the username of the person currently logged on to this computer
\$FilePath\: the filename and path of the current score. (This will not work until a score has been saved.)
\$FileName\: the filename of the current score without its path. (This will not work until a score has been saved.)
\$FileDate\: the date and time that the score was most recently saved, in the format stipulated by your system’s locale (e.g. dd MM yyyy hh:mm:ss)
\$PageNum\: the current page number.

So what can you do with wildcards? Here are four suggestions…

1. Set up your perfect manuscript paper

Sibelius’s default manuscript papers don’t use wildcards for things like the title, composer text, and so on, because they can be a bit of a surprise if you’re not expecting them: imagine never having heard of wildcards, and double-clicking a bit of text that says something like Sonata in A to edit it, only for it to promptly turn into \$Title\. If you’re of a particularly sensitive disposition, you might need a bit of a lie down afterwards.

But if you’re made of slightly sterner stuff, you can use wildcards to your advantage. If you have particular preferences about the fonts, sizes and positions of the title on the first page, composer name, headers, and so on, you can set up your preferences using House Style > Edit Text Styles and House Style > Default Positions, then create the wildcards in your score for things like title, composer, lyricist, and so on.

Now save your score as a manuscript paper via File > Export > Manuscript Paper and when you create your next masterpiece using this manuscript paper, the Title, Composer, etc. will all be filled in using the values you provide on the final page of File > New or via File > Score Info.

2. Create an instrumentation page

Works for large ensembles often contain a page at the start of the score that lists the instrumentation used. It’s easy enough to add this yourself by hand, but what if you add or remove instruments from your score? You have to keep it up-to-date.

Wildcards make this easier and more automatic. First, create one or more blank pages at the start of the score: if you already have a title page, select the initial barline at the start of bar 1 and choose Layout > Break > Special Page Break. In the dialog that appears, set Number of blank pages to 2 and click OK. If your score doesn’t already have a title page, choose Create > Title Page, set Number of blank pages to 2, and click OK.

On the second blank page, use Create > Text > Blank Page Text > Plain text, centered (on blank page) to create some blank page text, then type:

\$InstrumentChanges\

and hit Esc. Magically, the wildcard is replaced by a list of all of the instruments used in the score.

3. Set up a custom print footer

Sibelius has a built-in feature for printing various bits of useful information at the bottom of the page, so that you can keep track of different versions on the bits of paper scattered around your desk. If you’re not familiar with that feature, the options for what should be printed are on the Files page of Preferences, and the Print date and time footer option itself is in the File > Print dialog.

If you find the automatic choices a little inflexible, you can create your own customised footer using regular text and, of course, a couple of wildcards. For example, try Create > Text > Other System Text > Footer (inside edge), then type this:

Filename: \$FilePath\ Last modified: \$FileDate\

Now you will see the complete path to your file, and the date it was last saved, on the inside bottom corner of every page of your score.

4. Customise your headers

By default, Sibelius creates a header at the top of every page that says Full score in the score, and shows the name of the instrument in the dynamic parts. This is done by way of the wildcard \$HeaderPartName\, which corresponds to the Part name field in Score Info.

If you want to customise the headers in your score, it’s easy to do with the addition of some further wildcards. Make sure View > Hidden Objects is switched on, then double-click the existing header in your score. You’ll see a message asking you whether you want to go to Score Info to edit the value used by the wildcard: click No. Now edit the text as follows:

\$PageNum\ – \$Title\ – \$HeaderPartName\

and hit Esc. You can switch off the page numbers in the outside top corners of the page by going to Create > Other > Page Number Change, choosing Hide page numbers, and clicking OK. Click at the top of the first page to hide the automatic page numbers and show the ones in your customised header.

Have any tips of your own?

If you have any interesting use of wildcards in Sibelius, leave them in the comments for the benefit of other users.

How to connect Sibelius to Logic via ReWire

Daniel Spreadbury — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:00:51 +0000

My good friend Philip Rothman at NYC Music Services has been creating a number of tutorial videos about Sibelius and Finale and posting them at YouTube.

Philip is an expert user of both Sibelius and Finale, and has some valuable tips to share. The video above shows how to synchronise Sibelius’s playback with Logic Pro via ReWire. Other videos available at the time of writing show off instrument changes, vertical text (though he uses an unorthodox method: I would suggest adjusting the Angle parameter for a particular text style), and copying and pasting dynamics efficiently. Check them out — you’ll certainly find them useful.

Sibelius Blog

PC Pro says Sibelius First “hits all the right notes”

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Sibelius and Pro Tools come together in “The Fire and the Flood”

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NumPad 3.0 for iPhone supports all six Sibelius Keypad layouts

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Introducing a new way to buy Sibelius products

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Human Target scores direct hit with orchestral soundtrack

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Sibelius goes coast to coast on the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus

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The making of Pat Metheny’s “Orchestrion”

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Composer Ellen Zwilich on how technology benefits musicians

Related posts:

Unleash the power of text wildcards

How wildcards work

What wildcards are there?

1. Set up your perfect manuscript paper

2. Create an instrumentation page

3. Set up a custom print footer

4. Customise your headers

Have any tips of your own?

Related posts:

How to connect Sibelius to Logic via ReWire

Related posts: