Every update to Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT) has brought Sibelius users one more thing that DAW users have long taken for granted: velocity editing and a piano roll, a transport bar with grid control, graphical tempo curves, hit points, automation lanes. The latest release borrows another one: track icons.
That’s the headline feature in GMT 2026.8, and it’s one of two updates that James Barx has issued from ScoringWorld since we covered the launch of his Custom Tool Program in May. The other is a new version of the Graphical Harp Tool, which now writes glissandos across an entire chord.
Track icons in GMT 2026.8
Each staff can now carry a visual icon, drawn from an initial collection of dozens of instruments covering orchestral, band, and jazz writing. Sibelius, of course, already identifies a staff by its instrument name, and in a small score that is all anyone needs. GMT’s case for icons is about what happens when you have several tracks open at once and are moving between them: a picture of a bass clarinet registers faster than reading its name.
Working with several tracks at once has itself been improved. Previously, opening additional tracks meant the existing ones shrank to make room; now they keep their height, and a global vertical scroll moves you through the stack instead. If you have ever tried to draw a velocity curve in a lane the height of a postage stamp, you’ll appreciate the difference.
Two changes affect the Grid. It now supports triplet and tuplet snapping, so MIDI events that don’t land on binary subdivisions can be snapped rather than nudged into place by eye — a practical matter for anyone shaping swing feels, or for any passage where the notated rhythm is a tuplet in the first place. And holding Ctrl temporarily disables snapping altogether, for the moments when you want a value to sit exactly where you put it without going into the grid settings and back out again.
One thing worth repeating from our May coverage: GMT requires Sibelius 2024.3 or later. Furthermore, as of 2026.5, the plug-in communicates with Sibelius entirely through Sibelius Connect, and the legacy shortcut-key method is gone.
Chord glissandos in the Graphical Harp Tool
The Graphical Harp Tool was one of the three tools that came out of ScoringWorld’s Custom Tool Program in May, commissioned by film and concert composer Lior Rosner, whose score for Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael arrived in theaters this spring.
Until now the tool handled a glissando between two notes. The new version handles one that starts and ends on a chord.
The input is about as economical as it could be. Write the interval or chord you want the harp to glissando from, then write the top note of the final chord.
The tool spells the glissando according to the pedal setting and draws a glissando line for every note in the chord — the part that is tedious to assemble by hand, and easy to get subtly wrong when the pedals change. It also writes the MIDI messages, as hidden text, needed for the passage to play back.
Harp notation in Sibelius has never wanted for solutions, and we’ve written about most of them: Bob Zawalich’s e-book on notating music for harp in Sibelius, free at Notation Central, and Jawher Matmati’s HP Diagram font for building pedal diagrams. What Sibelius still lacks natively is the graphical pedal editor that MuseScore Studio 4.1 and Dorico 5.1.10 both added, and the Graphical Harp Tool remains the closest thing to it.
Availability
The Graphical Harp Tool is $19.99 at our Notation Central marketplace, alongside the Jazz Walking Bass Tool and the Native American Flute Tool at the same price. Graphical MIDI Tools is there too, in the full edition at $79.99 and the free, time-unlimited GMT Lite. Both are also available directly from ScoringWorld, where existing licensees can download the update.
Both of these releases started life as somebody’s specific problem — a harp writer’s, in the case of the Harp Tool, which began as a private commission before James put it in the public catalog. That is still how the Custom Tool Program works, and he is still taking pitches. If there’s a task Sibelius doesn’t do that you keep doing by hand, tell us about it in the comments — and then tell him.
