Welcome to the new Scoring Notes

Welcome to the new Scoring Notes!

If you’re reading this, you’ll have already noticed: the sidebars are gone, the colors have changed, and the whole place looks (and works) better. This is the first ground-up redesign in nearly a decade — not a fresh coat of paint on the old theme, but a brand-new one, built from scratch — and I can’t wait for you to spend some time with it.

The look

Gone is the right sidebar that had crowded the page for years (was it ever really that useful? Don’t answer that).

Every page is now a single, centered column, giving articles a wider, distraction-free reading measure on any screen. The visual identity is updated, too: navy and gold on a warm, off-white background. The familiar per-section colors — News, Reviews, Tips, and the rest — are still here, just showing up in more places: a colored band atop each article, category “pills,” and a colorful “Explore by topic” grid on the home page.

The home page itself is rebuilt around a featured story, a “Latest” grid, a podcast strip, and that topic grid. And because so much of our reading happens on a phone these days, the whole site is mobile-first now, with a proper hamburger menu and fixes for years of embedded tables, videos, and images that used to force sideways scrolling.

Reading an article, improved

Articles open with a category-colored hero band, and a byline with an author avatar, a reading-time estimate, and — on posts that have been meaningfully revised — an “Updated on” date. The article itself sits in a floating white “sheet,” with restyled headings, pull-quotes, and captioned figures; a reading-progress bar tracks your place as you scroll. Sharing is a one-click copy-link away, callout boxes have a proper theme instead of being hand-styled, and video embeds finally scale cleanly on any screen.

The podcast, reimagined

Every Scoring Notes podcast episode now has a bespoke, built-in audio player, and hosts and guests get a proper byline. A handful of episodes we’ve shared with permission from partner shows such as Twenty Thousand Hertz and Selling Sheet Music now carry an “Originally from” credit. You can walk through the whole catalog with previous/next episode navigation, the podcast landing page has been redesigned with follow buttons for every platform, and in-article episode embeds are now clean, on-brand cards.

Back to the future

Indulge me for a moment as we take a ride in our DeLorean… no flux capacitor required, just a strong pot of coffee and nearly two decades of archives to sort through.

This site started life as a single, modest post by Daniel Spreadbury in October 2008 — the unofficial Sibelius Blog, written from inside Sibelius itself, promising nothing more than “we’ll have a blast all the same.”

When Daniel moved on to Steinberg, he handed me the keys in November 2012, and I’ve been trying to do right by what he started ever since. A spring cleaning in March 2014 gave the blog its first real navigation and category-based reading lists — a small change, but the same instinct behind everything in this redesign: make the good stuff easier to find. In April 2017, the blog became Scoring Notes, widening its scope beyond Sibelius and getting its first proper site redesign to match. And in May 2020, the podcast arrived, with David MacDonald along for the ride, giving us a second way to tell these stories.

Posts from that original 2008–2012 run now carry a note marking them as Sibelius Blog, with a dedicated archive of their own — so the site’s origins stay visible rather than blurring into the stream.

To that lineage, we now add two more names. Jason Loffredo’s Conquering Finale video series, cross-published here since January 2021, is now organized as a proper curriculum: a numbered landing page, a series badge on each installment, and previous/next navigation through the lessons — including the three-part series on the end of Finale.

And then there’s Of Note.

One of the most respected music preparers and notation software experts of our time, Robert Puff began Of Note in 2011 and stewarded it until his death in 2022. More than 150 of his posts and those of his collaborators are now preserved here, with their original authorship and dates intact, in their own section marked with an in-memoriam note. Scoring Notes stalwart and Sibelius plug-in hero Bob Zawalich also contributed posts to Of Note, and now, when you pull up a list of Bob’s posts, you’ll find his Of Note contributions right there alongside everything else he’s written for us. If you never got to read Robert’s work, I’d encourage you to — here’s what I wrote when he passed.

I extend my deep gratitude to Jennifer Puff, Robert’s widow; Nat Puff, one of his daughters; and Jacob Winkler, one of Robert’s longtime colleagues, for their tremendous help with transferring the content and technical keys of Of Note over to Scoring Notes, and helping to preserve this legacy in a time when digital media can seem all too ephemeral.

In the footer, you’ll find Sibelius Blog and Of Note grouped under “Legacy,” with Conquering Finale under “Series.”

A few handy resources

The Product Guide — our reference page for Dorico, MuseScore, Sibelius, and Finale — is now data-driven, with vendor, current version, supported platforms, status, and recent coverage for each. As ever, it’s a good place to send someone getting their bearings on where the software stands.

Search has a cleaner results page and result counts now. The Subscribe page has been rebuilt too, with side-by-side sign-ups for post notifications and our newsletter digest, plus podcast and social links. About, Privacy, Donate, and Contact have all been refreshed as well — About now covers the Sibelius Blog, Of Note, and Conquering Finale alongside the full contributor roster, and Donate includes a curated list of Amazon picks for anyone who’d like to support the site through their everyday shopping.

Under the hood

Behind the scenes, we substantially trimmed the number of active WordPress add-ons by rebuilding old features natively into the theme, so the site is leaner and faster. We also improved accessibility — a keyboard-navigable mobile menu, labeled controls, better semantics — and cleaned up advertising so every ad is clearly marked, with the Product Guide kept ad-free.

A few small things you might not notice

Reading-time estimates, a placeholder image for posts without artwork, tidied-up tag pages (including descriptions for tags), Of Note titles normalized to our style, restyled blockquotes, fixed long URLs that used to force sideways scrolling, and tidier pagination. None of it makes headlines. All of it adds up.

What hasn’t changed

Nothing has been lost. Every article and podcast episode is preserved, including the entire Sibelius Blog era. Links and bookmarks still work, comments are intact, RSS feeds still work, and every way you currently follow the podcast is unaffected. This is a new home for the same work, not a new publication.

Say hello

I’d love to hear what you think — and if you spot anything broken after a migration this size, let me know. Keep up with new posts by subscribing to email notifications or the newsletter, follow the podcast, or find us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Thanks, as always, for reading — and for keeping us company for nearly two decades. Call this the overture, not the finale.