At NYC Music Services and Notation Central, we’re very pleased to announce that Scoring Express 2.0 for Dorico and Sibelius is here, with a fifth suite: Lead Sheets, in versions for both Dorico and Sibelius. Its main purpose: enter a jazz chart once, in one score, and produce concert, B-flat, E-flat, and bass clef versions from the same music.
That addresses a very ordinary problem in jazz publishing and preparation. The trumpet player and tenor need B-flat, the alto needs E-flat, the trombone or bass player may want bass clef, and the pianist wants concert pitch. However those versions are made, keeping several copies of the same chart in sync creates opportunities for mistakes. Fix a chord in three of them and miss the fourth, and someone at the gig has the old version.
The publishing world has dealt with the same problem for years by making separate books. Hal Leonard’s authorized sixth edition of The Real Book, for example, comes in four versions for Volume 1 alone: C, B-flat, E-flat, and bass clef. Same tunes, four books.
Those covers illustrate the convention, not our house style. The Scoring Express Lead Sheets suite doesn’t reproduce any publisher’s design; it comes with four styles of its own, which we’ll get to.
Scoring Express has included lead sheet templates for a long time. An earlier version of the New Real Book style has been in the Jazz suite since the first Sibelius release in December 2020, and in the Dorico suite since 2022. Those templates were principally about providing a solid template with an appearance consistent with the rest of the Jazz suite. The new Lead Sheets suite adds the transposition machinery directly into the Dorico and Sibelius templates, along with one-staff and two-staves versions in four house styles — plus a lot more.
The recent history
The idea behind the suite goes back further than the templates do. In 2022 we ran a series of posts here on creating a part with an alternate transposition in Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico — how to get an A clarinet part and a B♭ clarinet part out of the same music, without transposing anything by hand. That’s the machinery underneath the Lead Sheets templates, applied to a jazz chart rather than a clarinet part.
The comments on the Sibelius post are what stayed with me. Bob Zawalich turned up a year and a half later, having stumbled on it while researching something else:
I feel like I have just gone on a huge roller coaster ride, and at the very end I was sitting in the car with my fingers still clenching the handle, panting, and someone appears out of nowhere with a pile of papers, saying, “Here are your A clarinet parts — enjoy” then walking off into the crowd.
It was meant as a compliment and I took it as one, but he had also described the problem exactly. The ride is real, and most people would rather just be handed the parts.
Then in May 2024, Maximilian Maksutovic asked in the comments whether any of this worked for lead sheets. He was either copying a concert chart into each transposition, or building one score with an instrument for each and redoing the layout by hand every time. I told him it raised workflow questions better addressed in another post at some point.
Two years on, this is that post, and the answer is a template rather than a set of instructions. I had prototypes going not long after the 2022 posts, and prototypes are what they stayed. Explaining how to do something is one thing; getting it to where somebody can buy it, install it, and use it on a deadline is quite another. What I didn’t have was Stu Mindeman’s command of the idiom, or Joseph Trefler’s eye for the Sibelius side — to say nothing of Leo Nicholson deciding, while he was in there, to go through every setting in the other Dorico suites.
It’s the first new Scoring Express suite since Choral and Vocal arrived almost exactly a year ago.
One score, four parts
Each program gets eight templates: four house styles, each in one-staff and two-staves versions. Every template produces the same four charts from a single score.
| Part | Written pitch | Who reads it |
|---|---|---|
| C Instruments | Concert | Piano, guitar, flute, violin, voice |
| B-flat Instruments | Up a major 2nd | Trumpet, tenor saxophone, clarinet, soprano saxophone |
| E-flat Instruments | Up a major 6th | Alto saxophone, baritone saxophone |
| Bass Instruments | Concert, bass clef | Trombone, bass, bass clef readers |
Up a whole step covers trumpet, tenor, clarinet, and soprano sax; up a major 6th covers alto and baritone. On the lower staff of a two-staves template, the E-flat transposition is written down a minor 3rd instead, so a bass line or countermelody stays on the staff rather than heading north into the ledger lines.
Nothing is transposed by hand. Change a note in the score and it changes in the parts; add a chorus and everyone gets the chorus. That’s the whole idea.
Sibelius handles the bass clef version somewhat differently from Dorico, as we’ll see below.
Four house styles
The four styles are Academico, Sans, Petaluma, and New Real Book, and each is available in both staff formats:
- Academico — engraved music, serif page text.
- Sans — engraved music, sans-serif page text.
- Petaluma — handwritten music with matching handwritten page text.
- New Real Book — handwritten music under serif page text, following the general convention of Sher Music Co.’s The New Real Book, which is a different publication from the Hal Leonard volumes pictured above.
In Dorico, the engraved and handwritten music fonts are Bravura and Petaluma; in Sibelius, they are our derived versions of those same fonts: Norfolk and Pori.
So, yes, there is more than one way to make it real.
How Dorico does it
Every Scoring Express for Dorico – Lead Sheets template contains one score layout and four part layouts, all sharing the same players and flows. The transposition belongs to the layout. In Setup mode, right-click a layout and choose Clef and Transposition Overrides. If you want to add a fifth transposition — F horn, for example — duplicate a layout and change the overrides on the copy.
Because all five layouts share the same players and flows, their default export names would otherwise be too similar to tell apart. The templates therefore include the layout name in the file-name recipe in Print mode. Export all five at once and each PDF gets the appropriate name. We covered Dorico’s PDF export file names in detail last year.
Enharmonic respelling follows the same logic. A respelling made in the score propagates to the parts; one made in a part stays in that part. That’s exactly what you want when the B-flat and E-flat players have different ideas about how the same concert pitch ought to be spelled.
The two-staves templates use separate players for the upper and lower staves rather than a single grand-staff instrument. That allows the two staves to be transposed independently by octave and to have their own chord-symbol settings.
A brace is added manually at the start of the template and configured to appear when both staves are visible and disappear when only one is. In the parts, the empty staff hides automatically, and the brace goes with it.
If you add a second tune to a two-staves project, duplicate the existing flow rather than creating a new one. The first bar contains the Bracket and Barline Change signpost that makes the brace behave properly in every layout.
The New Real Book templates have one more Dorico-specific wrinkle. They combine handwritten music with serif page text, and the layout names contain flat signs. Left alone, Dorico would put a handwritten Petaluma flat into an otherwise serif header. It’s a small thing, but once you see it, you see it.
The templates instead use the {@layouttransposition@} token in the header rather than {@layoutname@}, with the engraved-style accidental specified for each layout in Library > Layout Options > Page Setup > Text Tokens. Most users will never touch any of this, which is rather the point. If you add another transposition whose name contains an accidental, though, that’s where the machinery lives.
How Sibelius does it
Scoring Express for Sibelius – Lead Sheets uses one score and four dynamic parts, and gets to substantially the same result by a different route. System and page breaks, gaps before codas, title pages, and page-number changes all propagate from the score to every part, so most of the layout work happens only once.
The bass clef part comes from a separate staff — or separate pair of staves in the two-staves templates — hidden in the score, rather than from the same staff as the other three parts.
Switch to Panorama view to see it, copy the music into it, and move it into the octave the instrument actually needs with Ctrl+↑ / ⌘↑. Sibelius does not provide a reliable way to link the bass clef part to the other parts while also keeping slash notation at the correct staff position. Slash notation wins that argument, so the hidden staff is the workaround.
Sibelius handles the alternate E-flat octave differently as well. Instead of a layout override, the templates include an instrument change to Eb INSTRUMENTS [bass clef, transposing 8ba], applied inside the E-flat part.
Instrument changes made in a part do not affect the score or the other parts, and they can be applied to a passage rather than the whole chart. That makes the Sibelius method somewhat more flexible than Dorico’s. Keep it away from slash notation, though, or the slashes will display an octave too high.
Multirests are off by default.
As close as each program allows
We’ve said before, including in the Scoring Express help videos, that the goal is to keep the Dorico and Sibelius versions as similar as possible while working with the particular features of each program.
That doesn’t mean pretending they’re identical. The differences here are documented:
- The bass clef part, as described above: shared players in Dorico, a hidden staff in Sibelius.
- Dorico shows a double barline at the start of a system when the previous system ended with one. Sibelius cannot display a double barline at the start of a system.
- Dorico draws the multi-bar play line with a Bravura repeated-segment glyph. Sibelius uses the closest available equivalent, a wavy wide-vibrato line, because Norfolk and Pori do not contain a matching glyph.
- Rehearsal-mark enclosures sit slightly farther from the letter in Sibelius.
- The Sans templates in Sibelius use the sans-serif time-signature style, which draws from a text font rather than a music font. Cut-time and common-time symbols therefore aren’t available in that style. If you need them, switch to the standard style in Appearance > Engraving Rules > Time Signatures.
None of these should come as a surprise after you start a project; they’re all covered in the documentation.
The jazz vocabulary, already built
Transposition is the main reason for the Lead Sheets suite, but quite a bit of the work went into the other things that make a jazz chart look and behave like one.
Both programs include text-with-line indications such as fill, 1st x only, 2nd x only, and custom text above and below the staff, along with multi-bar play lines and cue-size slash voices for rhythm-section hits. Layouts are cast off at four bars per system by default, giving most charts a sensible starting point before you touch the breaks yourself.
A Play 4 line spanning four bars of one chord needs to hide the internal barlines and the bar rests underneath it. Dorico and Sibelius, naturally, have entirely different opinions about how to accomplish this.
In Dorico, the templates use dashed barlines with the dash length set globally to zero. If you need visible dashed barlines elsewhere in the same project, use tick barlines for the hidden ones and adjust their tick properties instead. The bar rests are hidden by setting their color opacity to zero.
In Sibelius, the indication is made by layering Multi-bar play line and Multi-bar play number, with Magnetic Layout turned off for both, and setting the internal barlines to Invisible.
Adding a slash region in Dorico hides the other voices on the staff by default, including slash voices. The templates therefore turn on Show other voices for the region and set Voice direction to Down to get the vertical position right. Ledger lines are suppressed for slash voices throughout, allowing a cue-size hit above the staff to remain clean.
Winged repeat barlines and enlarged time signatures are enabled by default in both programs. So are systemic left barlines on single-staff systems. In Sibelius that applies only to the one-staff templates, because enabling the option in the two-staves version also brings back the brace. Software giveth, software taketh away.
In Dorico, the first system of a single-staff layout begins without a left barline, following the fake-book convention. Bob Zawalich caught us getting that wrong in a 2014 tip on this exact subject, back when the way to achieve the look was to set it up yourself in Finale or Sibelius. Twelve years later, Bob gets the last word.
Each template also comes with an annotated example file: a finished chart with comments explaining the setup at the point where it occurs. The examples are two tunes by Stu Mindeman, “Atacama” for the one-staff templates and “The Rumble” for the two-staves templates, used by permission.
Dynamics Express (Sibelius only)
The other major addition in 2.0 is a Sibelius plug-in, exclusive to Scoring Express, and unrelated to lead sheets. It’s called Dynamics Express, and it’s designed to bring the overall convenience of applying dynamics in Dorico with a popover into the Sibelius workflow — with a few differences and extra features. It’s included with all of the Scoring Express suites for Sibelius.
Creating a shaped dynamic passage in Sibelius normally involves several steps: add the opening dynamic, select the passage, add the hairpin, and add the closing dynamic.
Dynamics Express turns that into one typed string. Select a passage, run the plug-in, type ff>p, press Return, and you get the ff, the diminuendo, and the p on every selected staff. Each staff is handled independently according to its own first and last sounding notes.
The shorthand covers the things you’re likely to use:
- pp<ff and ff>p create a crescendo or diminuendo between two dynamics; a bare f creates a dynamic with no hairpin.
- Leave either side empty for an open end: <ff, ff>, or simply <.
- p<>f creates a messa di voce. The two halves meet at the midpoint of the passage’s duration on each staff, so the swell is balanced by time rather than note count. It also works on a single note.
- A hyphen anywhere in the string makes the hairpin dashed; a period makes it dotted. So pp<ff- creates a dashed crescendo and pp<ff. a dotted one. Position doesn’t matter, and asking for both at once is rejected.
- Spaces are ignored, so ff > p and ff>p are equivalent.
Sibelius treats text niente and the niente circle on a hairpin as different objects, and Dynamics Express keeps the distinction.
Lower-case n is a text dynamic — the softest graded one — and is placed like any other dynamic. So n<f produces a printed n.
Lower-case o means the niente circle on the hairpin itself. It adds no dynamic text and substitutes the appropriate from-silence or to-silence hairpin style. o<f creates a crescendo from silence; f>o creates a diminuendo to silence. The o is accepted only at the quiet end. A niente circle at the loud end isn’t a thing, and the plug-in won’t pretend otherwise.
Anything built from the lower-case letters f m n p r s z is accepted. That covers p through pppp, f through ffff, mp, mf, n, sfz, sf, fz, fp, rfz, rf, and related combinations.
Capitals and digits are rejected, which is also why cresc doesn’t work — use the hairpin syntax instead. Multi-segment strings such as pp are rejected rather than guessed at; run the plug-in twice. If a string cannot be parsed, the dialog reopens with a hint instead of simply failing.
Restyling hairpins you already have
Everything above creates new objects. Typing a single line-style character on its own does the opposite: it restyles the hairpins already in your selection and creates nothing.
| Type this | You get |
|---|---|
- |
every selected hairpin becomes dashed |
. |
every selected hairpin becomes dotted |
/ |
every selected hairpin becomes solid |
o |
every selected hairpin becomes niente — from silence, or to silence |
Dynamics Express uses Multicopy Dynamic, by our good friend Bob Zawalich, to set dynamic text in the correct music font. Multicopy Dynamic is bundled with Scoring Express and is also new in 2.0, so a normal installation includes both.
Since the whole point is speed, assign Dynamics Express a keyboard shortcut in File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts. Typing ff>p quickly and then hunting through menus rather defeats the exercise.
What else is new in 2.0
Lead Sheets and Dynamics Express are the headline additions, but every Scoring Express suite has been updated.
On the Dorico side, all templates were rebuilt in Dorico 6.2.30. Settings inherited from older Dorico 4 and 5 factory defaults were reviewed suite by suite against Dorico 6.2.
Most of that work is deliberately invisible. Among the settings that changed are accidentals, arpeggio lines, barline widths, repeat-barline wings, beam slants, chord symbols, hairpins across barlines, glissando lines, fermate, jazz articulations, ledger lines on slashes, trill extension lines, playing techniques in slash regions, multi-bar rests, slur thickness and its interaction with accidentals, staff labels, accidentals in text, ties, and time signatures.
Chord symbols now use Dorico 6’s chord-symbol component offset scaling instead of the legacy scaling, and clefs and key signatures are tracked across repeat structures.
Bravura’s small-clef glyphs have different proportions from their full-size counterparts, so a clef change using them does not quite match the clef at the start of the system. The templates now use a scaled-down regular clef glyph instead, at fractionally above 75%. The sort of thing nobody notices once it’s fixed, and everybody notices once it isn’t.
Elsewhere in the Dorico suites, Chamber gets adjustments to chord diagrams, figured bass, chord symbols, fingering, guitar bends, harp pedals, verse numbers, piano pedal lines, quote marks in staff labels, and cross-staff beam spacing.
In Theatre and Studio, vocal staves are now section players, so the divisi method of displaying character names shown in the tutorial videos works without any additional setup; hairpins are also bolder. In both Chamber and Theatre and Studio, instrument-change transitions now occur consistently at the first note on the new instrument.
On the Sibelius side, certain staff lines have been updated to use the line-continuation feature introduced in Sibelius 2026.8.
Four Engraving Rules are also now enabled across all templates:
- Bar Rests > Cross-staff passages > Hide bar rests
- Beams and Stems > Avoid cross-staff beam corners by placing primary beam on the side of the first note
- Accidentals and Dots > Cross-staff Accidentals > Rules for accidentals apply to cross-staff notes
- Ties 2 > Cross-staff Ties > Rules for ties apply to cross-staff notes
The “1/2” symbol kerning has been adjusted in certain templates, and all bundled plug-ins have been brought up to their current versions.
In Choral and Vocal, the Choral join arrow up and Choral join arrow down symbols now use music font box 29 instead of box 1, correcting a Windows problem that could prevent them from exporting properly to PDF.
If you already have scores using the old symbols, edit each one and change Character > Music font > Number to box 29.
In both programs, the Jazz suite’s original lead sheet templates now show a single barline at the start of each system and are deprecated as of this release. They remain installed and have been updated with the current Jazz settings, but future lead-sheet development will happen in the new Lead Sheets suite. The charts, as it were, have moved on.
Documentation
When we rebuilt the PDF Batch Utilities in March and moved their documentation to the web, we said other Notation Central products would follow.
Scoring Express is the largest of those. As of version 2.0, both products are fully documented online: 16 pages for Scoring Express for Dorico and 24 for Scoring Express for Sibelius, including the new Lead Sheets and Dynamics Express reference pages.
Version 2.0 also finishes moving Scoring Express away from PDF manuals. The last holdout was the documentation for the angled slash chord fonts, which previously shipped as a separate PDF and is now a web page like the rest of the documentation.
The fonts themselves are not new — we covered the ASC and ASL font update when it was released — but even the most beautifully formatted PDF, when buried in an installer folder, is a poor place for reference material people actually need to consult. The web version is easier to find, searchable, and can be corrected the day something changes. May that PDF rest in peace.
Compatibility and availability
For Sibelius, the minimum supported version for Scoring Express 2.0 is Sibelius Ultimate 2026.8. The template files themselves will open as far back as Sibelius Ultimate 2025.2, but features introduced in later versions will be unavailable. The staff-line continuations mentioned above, for example, require 2026.8.
The Chamber, Jazz, and Theatre and Studio suites continue to install the legacy version 1.6 as a courtesy, in a folder named _v.1.6 legacy for Sibelius 2024.10 and earlier inside each of those three suite folders.
That version works in Sibelius Ultimate 2020.3 through 2024.10, is no longer officially supported, and will not receive further updates. Choral and Vocal and Lead Sheets both postdate it, so there is no legacy version of either.
For Dorico, Scoring Express 2.0 requires Dorico Pro 6.2 or later. The templates are saved in Dorico 6.2.30 format and cannot be opened in earlier versions.
Scoring Express now consists of five suites for each program: Chamber, Choral and Vocal, Jazz, Theatre and Studio, and Lead Sheets.
Here’s a complete list of the suites, and prices, for Dorico and Sibelius:
Dorico:
- Scoring Express for Dorico – Chamber: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Dorico – Choral & Vocal: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Dorico – Jazz: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Dorico – Lead Sheets: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Dorico – Theatre & Studio: $79.99
Sibelius:
- Scoring Express for Sibelius – Chamber: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Sibelius – Choral & Vocal: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Sibelius – Jazz: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Sibelius – Lead Sheets: $69.99
- Scoring Express for Sibelius – Theatre & Studio: $79.99
Bundle discount
The “make-your-own” bundle option we introduced last year continues, just now with five suites to choose from per platform, instead of four, thanks to the addition of the Lead Sheets suite:
- For Sibelius, use the coupon code SESIB25 to get 25% off when you purchase 3 or more Scoring Express for Sibelius suites in a single purchase.
- For Dorico, use the coupon code SEDOR25 to get 25% off when you purchase 3 or more Scoring Express for Dorico suites in a single purchase.
If you already own any of the other suites, the 2.0 update is waiting in the Downloads section of your Notation Central account.
Credits
Stu Mindeman refined my original idea and built the Dorico templates, and provided two of his own tunes for the example files: “Atacama,” copyright © 2021 Stu Mindeman, and “The Rumble,” copyright © 2008 Stu Mindeman, used by permission.
Joseph Trefler adapted the entire suite for Sibelius, which, as the differences above make clear, involved considerably more than pressing Export. Leo Nicholson handled the template updates across the Dorico suites. Stu, Joseph, and Leo are all working musicians as well as music preparers, and much of the practical detail here comes from that experience.
Bob Zawalich’s plug-ins continue to do a great deal of work behind the scenes in Scoring Express for Sibelius, now including Multicopy Dynamic. If Scoring Express has a pit orchestra, Bob is somewhere down there making sure the show keeps moving.
We hope you enjoy Scoring Express. If you write charts regularly, we’d be interested to hear in the comments how the four-transposition setup compares with the way you’re doing this now.
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This is a huge step forward for those of us that scramble to provide lead sheets in all transpositions-well done!
Thanks so much, Dave!
I don’t understand. The software automatically transposes for each instrument in a score. I’m clearly missing something.
Hi Luis,
Yes, absolutely — and that’s not the part we’re trying to solve. As Dave’s comment above gets at, the use case is when you need to deliver the same lead sheet in C, B-flat, E-flat, and bass clef versions, all from the same source music.
Normally the software will transpose a part according to the instrument assigned to it. The wrinkle is producing multiple differently transposed versions of the same part and keeping them linked. We’ve covered that underlying problem before in Sibelius and Dorico, both of which are linked in the post.
The Lead Sheets templates essentially take that machinery and build it in from the start, along with the lead-sheet formatting and other jazz-specific details, so one chart produces all four deliverables and they stay in sync as you edit.
That’s what we have been looking for the last 30 years.
Seems fantastic!!!
I am gonna use it daily.
I hope that Bb versions for trumpet and tenorsax can be split using the correct octave for the melody within the range of the instrument.
I guess I’d have to see an example of the lead sheets you’re talking about. As I understand what you’re saying, it seems that the only thing necessary is to add the instruments to the score, then copy the part you want to have in those instruments to those instruments and it’s all transposed. If formatting/engraving is also a concern, doesn’t that always require tweaking per part anyway? I have a brass quartet, and the challenge (though a minor one) is to find a place to turn the page (we all use tablets) reasonably conveniently.
What you’re describing absolutely works — but it’s also essentially the workflow these templates are designed to avoid. If you add four instruments and copy the music onto each of them, you now have four independent copies of the chart. Change a chord, fix a note, add four bars, etc., and you need to make sure the change gets into every copy.
The point here is that the C, B-flat, E-flat, and bass-clef versions are derived from the same source music. In Dorico, for example, the same players and flows appear in multiple layouts with different transposition overrides; there’s no copied music to keep synchronized. Sibelius gets to substantially the same result by a different route using dynamic parts.
There are examples right in the post — particularly the image captioned “The same four parts, from one source score.” And the earlier articles linked there on alternate transpositions in Sibelius and Dorico explain the underlying concept in more detail.
Even the layout work doesn’t necessarily have to be repeated. Sibelius has Copy Part Layout to transfer system and page breaks between parts, and Dorico has corresponding layout tools for carrying formatting between related layouts. So you can establish a good page turn in one version and use that as the basis for the others, while still making individual adjustments where needed.