Sibelius Blog » Tips

Use your iPad as an external display for Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:38:14 +0000

Air Display extends your Mac or PC's display onto your iPad (courtesy johanhalin on Flickr)

I’ve posted before about handy apps for your iPhone or iPad that can make you more productive with Sibelius, and here’s another. Thanks go to Sibelius user Koen Vits for this tip:

I recently discovered something neat for iOS users (iPads, iPhones, iPod Touches). You can download an app called Air Display to use your iOS device as an external display. It also works with multi-touch, so I dragged the Sibelius mixer, the playback window and so on onto the secondary screen and now I can just ‘tap’ on play, or in the mixer! Very handy!

Air Display is available in the iTunes store.

Composer Lev Zhurbin shares his laptop tips for Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:00:48 +0000

Violist and composer Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin (Photo: Peter Gannushkin)

Violist and composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin has shared his productivity tips for working effectively with Sibelius on a laptop computer on his blog. He says,

I’ve been using Sibelius on a laptop for several years, and have just recently figured out a really comfortable mobile setup, which makes my relationship with Sibelius a lot more productive, at a cumulative cost of approximately $35.

What mythical items does Ljova say you should buy for the princely sum of $35 to transform your work with Sibelius? Read on to find out.

How to get a helping hand with Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:20:47 +0000

The Sibelius hotline, yesterday (courtesy Phillie Casablanca on Flickr)

Avid has recently rolled out a new unified support policy for all of its products, which has changed the standard support entitlement for many of its products, including Sibelius. Read on for a run-down of the changes and how they could affect you and, most importantly, the many other ways you can obtain support for your copy of Sibelius.

The new policy involves the use of Avid Support Codes (ASCs) to enable you to contact Avid’s support team. When you purchase a new copy of Sibelius or an upgrade, you will receive a complimentary ASC allowing you to contact support to resolve a single incident (even if that takes multiple emails or phone calls). After that, if you want to contact support again, you can purchase additional ASCs from Avid’s online store.

However, one of the real benefits of using Sibelius is its amazing user community, and there are plenty of ways to get great support without contacting Avid’s support team. Here are a few suggestions.

Product documentation

Sibelius comes with comprehensive documentation, and it should be the first place you look for an answer when you’re stuck. Look in the Help > Documentation submenu in Sibelius 6 to find more than 1000 pages of documentation designed to help you answer your questions.

Here are some tips to using the documentation effectively:

Try the Visual index section just before the text index at the back of the Sibelius Reference book. This is particularly useful when you’re not sure what a particular notation element is called.
Try the table of contents as well as the index. If you’re looking for an answer about, say, chord symbols, find the Chord symbols topic via the table of contents and flip through the topic, rather than going straight to the index.
Think about the terminology you’re using. While I’ve done my best to index and cross-reference all of the common terms, unfortunately there are many different words for the same thing, and I may have missed one out. (If you find a term that’s familiar to you but isn’t indexed, do let me know about it.)

All of the documentation for Sibelius is also available for download from the Sibelius web site in PDF format. If you have an iPad, why not try loading the PDF into iBooks by adding it to your iTunes library? (I’m sure other digital readers allow a similar kind of thing.)

If you would like to purchase a hard copy of the Sibelius 6 Reference book, it’s available from Amazon in the US and the UK, and otherwise from Avid’s online store.

There are a couple of third party books about Sibelius available, but neither has yet been updated for Sibelius 6 (though publishers Hal Leonard and Cengage have their authors working on it):

Mastering Sibelius 5 by Marc Schonbrun
Sibelius: A Comprehensive Guide by Tom Rudolph and Vince Leonard

Online knowledge base

The online Help Center at the Sibelius web site has more than 600 articles, and more are being added all the time. You can also find the same content at the Avid site, with a slightly different search mechanism. Try out both of them and see which works best for you.

User-to-user forum

The forum on the Sibelius web site is the Sibelius user’s secret weapon. If you’re not going here when you need help, you’re missing out. This is where the amazing Sibelius user community really comes into its own. Because only registered Sibelius users can post to the forum (though anybody can read it via guest access), there’s a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and flame wars and trolls are few and far between.

You can very often post on the forum and receive an answer from an experienced Sibelius user (or often from me) within minutes of posting your question. Often you will get a faster response via the forum than you would get if you contacted Avid’s dedicated tech support staff!

The forum is probably the most important support resource available to a Sibelius user, and it’s no understatement to say that is one of the most remarkable things about the product and its community.

(By the way, don’t be fooled by SibeliusForum.com: although there are a couple of experienced users hanging out there and providing answers to people who post questions, this site is not affiliated with Avid or Sibelius and I can’t personally recommend it.)

Mailing list

If you don’t like the vibe of a web forum, you might prefer the Sibelius mailing list. While unofficial, I have been a member of this list for almost as long as I have been working on Sibelius, so it’s a good place to ask questions.

Like the forum on the web site, there’s a community of expert Sibelius users on this list, and although the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than the forum (as you might expect from a largely unmoderated mailing list), it’s still a friendly place to hang out, and you’ll learn lots of things, both about Sibelius and music in general.

Tutorial videos

There are plenty of free tutorial videos available for Sibelius. The most viewed post on this blog (by some margin!) is for my friend James Humberstone’s excellent series that will help you to learn Sibelius in one hour. Other videos you should check out:

You can also buy tutorial videos from various third parties, including for your iPhone.

…and this blog

I do my best to post useful and helpful tips and tutorials on this blog as often as I can. We’ve even had the odd guest post, so if you’re itching to share your secret Sibelius expertise with the world, get in touch! To be sure you don’t miss out, make sure you subscribe to the blog (you can choose to receive each post by email when it’s added, or to receive a monthly digest).

Note to self: post about Comments

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:11:47 +0000

Some sticky notes, yesterday (courtesy ~Thanh on Flickr)

One of the neat little things we added in Sibelius 6 is the ability to create sticky note comments in the score.

Creating a comment

To create a comment, simply choose Create > Comment (shortcut Shift+Alt+C on Windows or Shift-Opt-C on Mac) or click the little sticky note icon on the toolbar, which looks like the picture on the left. If you had a selection in the score when you clicked the button, then a comment will be created containing some default text, specifying the staff or staves you had selected, and in which bars. This is a great time-saver: if you want to leave a comment for yourself or, say, your editor or teacher about a particular range of bars, this saves you typing in anything about the bars in question. If you only had a note or another single object selected, an empty comment will be created, ready for you to type. And if you had nothing selected, then you get a loaded mouse pointer, ready for you to click into the score to create an empty comment.

Once you have finished typing your comment, simply click elsewhere on the screen or hit Esc. Your comment appears, and by default you’ll see your name and the date and time at which you created or last edited the comment in its little title bar (if the comment isn’t very wide, or your name is very long, you might see only your name or only the date).

To edit a comment, simply double-click the main part of the comment. You can also drag comments around, delete them, and copy and paste them like other objects. You can also double-click the little title bar on the comment to minimise the comment, shrinking it down to a little square with just your initials showing. To make it bigger again, simply double-click it once more. (If you want to maximise or minimise all of the comments in your score at once, there’s a plug-in for that, available for download from the Sibelius web site).

Caring and sharing

If you share your score with somebody else who also has Sibelius 6, they can leave comments of their own in your score. Comments added by another person are automatically set to a different colour, and show the name of the person who left the comment. This makes it really easy to have somebody review your work and leave comments in situ for you to work on.

You can also export all of the comments in your score as part of the log concerning the Versions in your score. To do this, choose File > Versions > Edit Versions, and choose Export Log. (If you want to export only the comments in your score, there’s a plug-in for that too).

If you want to hide the comments in your score temporarily, you can switch off View > Comments. If you want to print the comments out when you print your score, make sure View > Comments is switched on, and that any other options in the View menu that you don’t want to see on your printed page are switched off. Then choose File > Print and switch on the Print View menu options, and away you go.

Other fun with comments

You can change the name that appears in the comment, choose whether or not the date and time shows, and whether Sibelius should prefer to show the name or the date when there’s not enough room to show both, on the Other page of File > Preferences (in the Sibelius menu on Mac).

Lastly, there are a handful of other plug-ins that can do useful things with comments:

Convert Text to Comments: takes text in a specified text style and automatically turns that text into sticky comments. This is useful if you have been adding comments yourself in earlier versions of Sibelius in an ad hoc manner using a particular text style.
Filter Comments: allows you to select all the comments in your score in one operation, so that you can delete or recolour them.
Find Comments: allows you to quickly select the next or previous comment in the score. Try assigning keyboard shortcuts to these plug-ins for extra efficiency!
Go To Comment: shows you a list of all of the comments in the score, and allows you to navigate quickly to the location of the chosen comment.
Highlights To Comment Color: lists the colours used for comments in the score, and allows you to set any highlights near those comments to the same colour as the nearby comments, making it easy to associate highlights and comments together by the user who added them.

What uses have you found for comments in Sibelius 6? Leave a, uh, comment.

Nashville Chord Numbers plug-in

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:51:21 +0000

Courtesy Tadson on Flickr

Nashville chord numbers provide a key-agnostic way of describing chord symbols using numbers to represent degrees of the scale, rather than traditional letter-based note names.

According to Wikipedia, the Nashville numbering system was invented by Neal Matthews, Jr. in the 1950s for The Jordanaires, the singing group most famous for providing the backing vocals on most of Elvis Presley’s albums. Despite its longevity, the system hasn’t necessarily gained much currency outside of Nashville, but for musicians on the scene in Music City, USA, being able to read Nashville numbers is a valuable skill.

If you’re a demon player who can transpose any song at sight, you can carry a single chart in your gig bag, and play the changes in whatever key the singer requires, translating the numbers on the page into the appropriate chords for the corresponding degree of the scale of the current key.

In order to bring this convention to Sibelius users, plug-in guru Bob Zawalich has written Nashville Chord Numbers, a plug-in that can convert to and from Nashville numbers in your score. So you can take a simple chord progression like this:

and turn it into this:

at the click of a button (and it can turn it back again, too).

So give it a try and see what you think. Do you use Nashville chord numbers? If so, leave your experiences in the comments.

Useful plug-ins for handling rests in voices

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:13:16 +0000

This post is written by Bob Zawalich, author of more than 200 plug-ins for Sibelius.

Adding notes in a new voice can create a number of rests that you may not want to see. There are a number of plug-ins available that can help. Some of these will run in Sibelius versions as early as Sibelius 3, but many need Sibelius 5 or later. More after the jump.

Examples will show the results of these plug-ins, and all will start with this bar, with notes in voice 2, notes and rests in voice 3, and rests in voice 1 and 4.

If you want to combine a number of rests into larger rests, the best choice is Plug-ins > Simplify Notation > Combine Tied Notes and Rests. This plug-in can combine adjacent rests, taking into account the time signature, so that rests still split across beat groupings.

In this example, the plug-in combines the rests in voices 1 and 4 into bar rests. It combines the first two beats of voice 3′s rests into a half rest.

If you have voices that are entirely rests, there are a number of plug-in that can help.

If you want to get rid of them altogether, Delete Rests Empty Voices (compatible with Sibelius 5 and Sibelius 6) will eliminate the rests in all empty voices, unless all the voices in the bar are empty. In that case, any rests in voice 1 will be consolidated into a bar rest, and rests in other voices will be deleted.

In the following example, the rests in voice 1 and 4 were deleted, and voices 2 and 3 are unchanged. (This plug-in only affects voices that are all rests).

Combine Rests Empty Voices will combine the rests in empty voices into bar rests if run in Sibelius 5 or later, and into the largest available (non-bar rest) rests if run before Sibelius 5. It also hides the rests in empty voices for all voices later than the first voice containing notes or rests.

So the empty voices 1 and 4 get bar rests, and voice 4, being after the first voice containing notes, has its bar rest hidden. Voices 2 and 3 are unchanged.

Replace Rests with Bar Rests (compatible with Sibelius 5 and Sibelius 6) adds bar rests to voices in selected bars which contain rests, but neither notes nor tuplets. It essentially replaces multiple rests with a bar rest as appropriate. It optionally skips bars of small duration (user can select the minimum duration). It is very similar to Combine Rests Empty Voices when run in Sibelius 5 or later, but the “extra features” are a bit different.

So in the example, there are bar rests in voices 1 and 4, but the voice 4 bar rest is not hidden.

Hide Rests In Voice lets you specify voices, and it will hide all selected rests in that voice. It does not combine the rests, it just hides them.

In this example, I asked to hide the rests in voices 3 and 4. The rests in voice 1 are unchanged.

Hide Duplicate Rests hides rests that duplicate a rest (of the same position and duration) in another voice. So if you have a quarter rest at the same position in voices 1 and 2, and just want to see one of them, run this plug-in.

For this example, I changed the Before example so the quarter rests in voices 1 and 4 overlapped (you only see the rests in voice 4). In the After bar, the voice 4 rests are hidden (and shifted somewhat in their vertical position). Note also that the eighth rest in voice 3 on the “and” of beat 3 is also hidden. The plug-in hides rests as the same rhythmic position, independently of vertical or horizontal adjustments.

Add Bar Rests In Empty Voices lets you indicate the absence of notes in a particular voice. This can be useful if you paste a passage that contained bar rests in several voices, since bar rests are not pasted. So if you have notes in voice 1 but want a bar rest in voices 2 and 3, this plug-in will do that for you.

Here, the Before example has the rests in voices 1 and 4 stripped out, and Add Bar Rests In Empty Voices was told to add bar rests for those voices.

There are a few more plug-ins that deal specifically with rests, but not necessarily with multiple voices.

Multirests and Empty Bars tries to determine what has caused a multirest to break.
Split Multirests splits multirests at predetermined locations
Split Bar Rests breaks bar rests into smaller pieces, the size of which is based on the time signature.
Replace Deleted Rests looks for places where rests have been deleted rather than hidden, and will add rests back. By default it will hide the added rests.
Fill Up Pick-up Bar (written by Peter Hayter) changes a bar rest symbol in a pick-up bar into discrete rests. The pick-up bar must have a shorter duration than the prevailing time signature.
Plug-ins > Notes and Rests > Split Dotted Quarter Rests splits dotted quarter rests in compound time into quarter rests and eighth rests.

Split Dotted Quarter Rests and Combine Tied Notes and Rests ship with Sibelius 6; all the other plug-ins described are available for free download from the Sibelius web site, by clicking the links above. To see all of the plug-ins available for Sibelius, browse the list.

Working with lyric hyphens

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:08:03 +0000

A hyphen, yesterday.

Continuing a series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius, today I’m writing about lyric hyphens. The humble hyphen plays a central role in your lyrics… literally. It appears between different syllables to make sure that you can tell that the word is split between two or more notes.

Man in the middle

If you ever discover that a lyric hyphen isn’t correctly centred between two syllables, there’s an easy remedy: select the hyphen itself, and choose Layout > Reset Position (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows or Shift-Command-P on Mac), and the hyphen will immediately snap back to the right position.

Squeeze me

By default, Sibelius allows hyphens between syllables to disappear if the spacing is sufficiently tight that there is insufficient room for the hyphen to appear without colliding with the syllable on either side. This is very handy in certain languages, such as English, in which it’s often acceptable for lyric hyphens not to appear, provided the end result is unambiguous enough, i.e. it’s obvious where the word splits into two syllables and which syllable is to be sung on which note.

However, in some languages, this behaviour is less than helpful, and in extreme circumstances the removal of a hyphen can change the meaning of the lyrics. So Sibelius now has an option on the Text page of House Style > Engraving Rules to prevent hyphens from disappearing, even when spacing is very tight: just switch off Hyphens allowed to disappear when syllables are too close together. (This option is only available in Sibelius 6.2 or later versions.)

Distancing yourself

For long melismas, where the same syllable is sung over many notes, there may be a large enough gap between syllables that more than one hyphen can appear. It’s important that hyphens don’t appear too close together, as they can be visually distracting to the singer, but at the same time hyphens must appear sufficiently close together that the singer can see at a glance that he or she is in the middle of a melisma. By default, Sibelius allows eight spaces between lyric hyphens, but this is easy to change: simply adjust the Lyric hyphens: n spaces apart parameter on the Text page of House Style > Engraving Rules. Useful values are in the range 6–12 spaces.

Conversely, if you want to ensure that only one lyric hyphen appears regardless of the distance between syllables, exactly centred between the syllables on either side, switch on One hyphen maximum.

Any more for any more?

That concludes this series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius. If there is anything about lyrics you’re curious about or would like to see covered in a future post, please leave a comment!

Traditional lyrics beaming and slurs on melismas

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:04:42 +0000

Continuing a series of posts looking at lyrics in Sibelius, today I’m going to talk about a couple of plug-ins that can help you achieve a traditional appearance for the lyrics in your scores.

Beaming

In vocal music published until the middle of the last century, it was customary for beams to be broken for every change of syllable or word, like this:

Nowadays, common practice for lyrics is that the beaming should follow the normal rules for beaming, on the grounds that beaming shows the metrical grouping of the music, and singers have as much need of this information as instrumentalists. The same passage above would look like this using modern beaming conventions:

Sibelius produces the modern convention by default, but if you want to use the old-fashioned beaming in your score, it’s easy to do by choosing Plug-ins > Text > Traditional Lyrics Beaming.

Which convention should you follow? It’s up to you, but most singers find the modern convention much easier to read.

Melismas

A different convention for lyrics was to use slurs to indicate melismas, where a single syllable or word spans multiple notes, like this:

Again, one of Sibelius’s supplied plug-ins makes it very easy to achieve this: simply choose Plug-ins > Text > Add Slurs to Lyrics and Sibelius will take care of it all for you.

Adding extra lines of lyrics

Daniel Spreadbury — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:50:58 +0000

Think of your singers before you decide to do this!

Continuing a series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius, today we’re going to talk about adding extra lines of lyrics. Each line of lyrics uses its own text style. This has lots of advantages, such as allowing you to change the font or point size in one operation, making it easy to select all the lyrics in a particular line by filtering for that text style, and so on. But there are only text styles for five lines of lyrics set up by default.

In most situations, if you have more than five lines of lyrics, you should probably consider putting the lyrics at the end of the score in a separate block rather than putting them under the notes, but if you’re determined to give your singers eye-strain, you can of course add extra lines of lyrics, like this:

Choose House Style > Edit Text Styles
Select Lyrics line 5 from the list of text styles, and click New
When asked if you’re sure you want to create a new text style on this, click Yes
In the dialog that appears, on the General page, change the name to Lyrics line 6 and click OK, then Close
Now choose House Style > Default Positions
With the Text styles radio button selected at the top left of the dialog, choose the new Lyrics line 6 text style from the list on the left-hand side.
In the Creating with keyboard group of options, change Vertical position relative to staff from 14 spaces to 16.5 spaces. (Each line of lyrics should be 2.5 spaces below the last by default.)
Click OK.

Now you can create your sixth line of lyrics by choosing Create > Text > Lyrics > Lyrics line 6.

But do consider whether you really need more than five lines of lyrics under the notes. There’s normally a better, easier to read way to present the music and lyrics.

One final tip: if you want to add nicely-aligned verse numbers to the start of each verse of lyrics in a single step, use Plug-ins > Text > Add Verse Numbers.

Making lyrics something to sing about

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:32:56 +0000

Courtesy banlon1964 on Flickr

One of the mature music notation programs recently touted lyrics that “instantly appear exactly as they’ll print out” as one of the major new features of a new version that costs in the region of $150 for their existing users to upgrade. Sibelius users have enjoyed lyrics that look exactly as they will be printed for many years – and Sibelius has other tricks up its sleeve for lyrics that other software simply can’t match. So I thought it was worth taking a look at lyrics in a bit of detail to share some hints and tips over a handful of posts, starting with lyric input.

Easy input

To input lyrics in Sibelius, there are several methods:

Type them syllable by syllable, hitting - (hyphen) to break a word, and Space to start a new word, hitting - or Space multiple times to input a melisma
Paste them syllable by syllable from a text file, which doesn’t even need to be hyphenated
Flow them into the score from a text file in a single operation

These last two methods are unique to Sibelius. Pasting lyrics syllable by syllable is really simple, as you can see from this video:

First, select the text in your text editor or word processor, and copy it to the clipboard, normally done via Edit > Copy (typical shortcut Ctrl+C on Windows or Command-C on Mac)
In Sibelius, select the note on which you want the lyrics to begin, and type Ctrl+L on Windows or Command-L on Mac to start lyrics input
Now type Ctrl+V on Windows or Command-V on Mac to paste the first syllable, and hit the shortcut again and again to paste further syllables.
When you come to a melisma, simply hit Space or - (hyphen) to move on to the next note.

Even easier is flowing the lyrics automatically into the score from a text file, as shown in this second video:

First, select the passage of notes into which you want to flow the music. If the passage contains melismas (places where the same word or syllable is sung to multiple notes), make sure that they are marked with slurs before you begin.
Next, choose Create > Text > Lyrics > From Text File.
In the dialog that appears, click Browse to choose the text file, then click OK.

Moments later, the lyrics are flowed into the score in a single operation, automatically hyphenated and with all the melismas marked.

Only Sibelius contains these time-saving lyric input techniques with automatic hyphenation. And they always appear on screen exactly as they are going to print out!

Sibelius Blog » Tips

Use your iPad as an external display for Sibelius

Related posts:

Composer Lev Zhurbin shares his laptop tips for Sibelius

Related posts:

How to get a helping hand with Sibelius

Product documentation

Online knowledge base

User-to-user forum

Mailing list

Tutorial videos

…and this blog

Related posts:

Note to self: post about Comments

Creating a comment

Caring and sharing

Other fun with comments

Related posts:

Nashville Chord Numbers plug-in

Related posts:

Useful plug-ins for handling rests in voices

Related posts:

Working with lyric hyphens

Man in the middle

Squeeze me

Distancing yourself

Any more for any more?

Related posts:

Traditional lyrics beaming and slurs on melismas

Beaming

Melismas

Related posts:

Adding extra lines of lyrics

Related posts:

Making lyrics something to sing about

Easy input

Related posts: