You can do just about anything with time signatures in Finale, if you know how to tame the beast. In this video tutorial series, start with the basics and then learn about composite, alternating and independent time signatures, how to make them film score “oversize” style, pickup measures, and more.
Even if you’ve discovered the setting in Sibelius to display numbers on every bar in the parts, you’re left with positioning options ranging from bad to mediocre. Let’s fix this, once and for all.
We have a two-part podcast interview with composer Christopher Willis. We talk with Chris about his score to the movie “The Personal History of David Copperfield” and its fresh take on familiar musical ideas, and break down Chris’s music preparation process on a film from orchestration to copying.
Graphical MIDI Tools (GMT) is a Sibelius plug-in that ingeniously superimposes a sequencer-like frame on any given selection, and then gives the user the ability to draw in automations to manipulate the data. Moreover, there are additional windows to adjust velocity and note duration in piano roll-like fashion.
Tristan Noon’s e-book Notes to Notes: The Ultimate Guide to Business in Film & TV Music is a comprehensive and approachable guide to the music business, conveyed from the perspective of real-world experience.
StaffPad, the music composition app that uses handwriting recognition as the means of music entry, has been released for iPad and completely rebuilt for Windows, with a bevy of new features, improvements, and add-ons compared to the previous version. In addition, there is a new free digital music stand app for performers, called StaffPad Reader, providing a synced performance experience across multiple tablets.
Sibelius 2020.1, released to coincide with the opening of the 2020 NAMM Show, introduces automatic staff spacing, dashed and dotted ties, ties into notes, new house styles, accessibility improvements, and more.
Avid has released Sibelius 2019.9. It introduces an impressive new way of importing MIDI data that can make working with such files in Sibelius much easier and faster.
Dorico Pro 2.0, released today, is a major update to Steinberg’s music notation software, with new features across the board in many areas. Smart staff management, slash notation, bar repeats, a new handwritten music font, a new system track, support for large time signatures, automation in Play mode, video support, and much more round out an impressive release.
Andrew Noah Cap gives a thorough review of Dorico’s playback capabilities and the wide variety of needs it attempts to address — from engravers preferring simple playback, to those wanting adequate sound rendering without thinking too much about settings and post-editing, to those that expect playback and editing functionality that is comparable to MIDI editing within a DAW.