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.
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