This article was first published in the January 2001 issue of Sibelius’s web magazine, Siblings, which is no longer available on the Sibelius web site. It was written by Andrea Pessino, at the time a software engineer and composer working with one of the world leading developers of computer games, Blizzard Entertainment, makers of such […]
December 2008
Video games: the fresh musical frontier
Most of my youth was (mis)spent playing video games on a series of home computers, and even though I am now in my thirties, I still have a keen interest in video games and play as often as I can. I was interested to read an article in The Seattle Times about TV and film […]
Tip: Use Notes > Re-input Pitches to save time
I’ve linked to Dr. Tom Rudolph’s blog before, but Tom’s most recent post is definitely worth a fresh link. He talks about the benefits of using the re-pitching features in your notation software to save time when creating parts: If you use notation software to notate scores, consider using the re-input pitch option available in […]
Student Composer Competition: one week of voting left
For the past couple of years Sibelius has run competitions for student composers in the UK and Australia. Voting for this year’s competition for students aged between 10-16 and 17-18 here in the UK is about to close at the end of December 31st. The competition has once again seen hundreds of entries, and this […]
In commemoration of Sibelius’s birthday
Yesterday was the birthday of Sibelius the composer. Slightly belatedly, here’s an article that was first published in The Guardian newspaper in the UK on the occasion of the great man’s 83rd birthday in 1948. “There are only two places where you can be at peace and compose,” he replied, “a big city and a […]
Henle’s music engraving video
One of the world’s most respected music publishers is G. Henle Verlag. I have several Henle scores — including some that have been engraved in Sibelius — and their commitment to beauty and clarity in the scores that they publish is practically unrivalled. Henle still employ a variety of techniques in producing their beautiful scores, […]
Sibelius for the visually impaired
We have always tried to make Sibelius as accessible as possible for users with disabilities or impairments. Mostly this has been achieved through trying to follow the guidelines set by Microsoft and Apple for how applications should interact with the accessibility technologies built in to the operating system. Blind and visually impaired users have been […]
Creating PDFs from Sibelius
Update – September 16, 2013: The following post from 2008 pertains to Sibelius 6 and earlier versions. For instructions and tips on how to create PDF files from Sibelius 7, see this blog post. Nowadays many Sibelius worfklows end with creating a PDF file. “PDF” stands for “Portable Document Format,” and it’s an open standard […]
Guidelines for preparing scores and parts for performance
Although Sibelius will always do its best to produce a good, legible full score and instrumental parts that you can feel confident about presenting to a group of players with a minimum of laborious editing by the user, there is no substitute for a real working knowledge of the issues you might face when presenting […]
Eric Whitacre on the role of notation software in composition
A composer whose work I greatly admire, Eric Whitacre, has been blogging for about a year at SoaringLeap.com. He has started a series of posts that he calls “Advice for the Emerging Composer,” and in the very first post in the series, he writes about how notation software hinders his compositional process. He writes: I […]