If you need to make a symbol larger without affecting the size of the rest of the music, how do you do it? The answer lies in the House Style > Edit Symbols dialog. In the picture above, the comma symbol often used as a breath mark is shown in four sizes. Here’s how to […]
One of the hidden gems amongst the many hundreds of time-saving features in Sibelius is multicopy. Simply put, multicopy allows you to take any selection – whether it’s a passage of notes, or a dynamic mark, or a selection of chord symbols – and quickly copy it to many staves, either once or multiple times, […]
Back in June I wrote a short series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius. In the first of those posts I wrote about Sibelius’s unique feature that allows you to flow lyrics from a text file directly into your score in a single operation. Now Dr Tom Rudolph has dedicated a post on his Making […]
Violist and composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin has shared his productivity tips for working effectively with Sibelius on a laptop computer on his blog. He says, I’ve been using Sibelius on a laptop for several years, and have just recently figured out a really comfortable mobile setup, which makes my relationship with Sibelius a lot more […]
Continuing a series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius, today I’m writing about lyric hyphens. The humble hyphen plays a central role in your lyrics… literally. It appears between different syllables to make sure that you can tell that the word is split between two or more notes. Man in the middle If you ever […]
Continuing a series of posts looking at lyrics in Sibelius, today I’m going to talk about a couple of plug-ins that can help you achieve a traditional appearance for the lyrics in your scores. Beaming In vocal music published until the middle of the last century, it was customary for beams to be broken for […]
Continuing a series of posts about lyrics in Sibelius, today we’re going to talk about adding extra lines of lyrics. Each line of lyrics uses its own text style. This has lots of advantages, such as allowing you to change the font or point size in one operation, making it easy to select all the lyrics […]
One of the mature music notation programs recently touted lyrics that “instantly appear exactly as they’ll print out” as one of the major new features of a new version that costs in the region of $150 for their existing users to upgrade. Sibelius users have enjoyed lyrics that look exactly as they will be printed […]
In order to produce a good, consistent and attractive layout, there are many factors you have to consider. First you have to determine page size and staff size, and then from there you need to work out how to ensure there is sufficient white space around the edges of the page, and sufficient distances between […]
Sibelius includes four complete families of music fonts as standard, each of which has a slightly different look. Opus, the default music font family, has a modern look with elliptical noteheads and strong lines. Helsinki is more traditional in appearance, with rounder noteheads and finer lines. Inkpen2 and Reprise are handwritten in appearance, the former […]