The Check Pizzicatos plug-in ships with Sibelius and it has saved me many minutes of work on many scores, and saved many minutes of rehearsal time. Its sole purpose is to locate suspect arco and pizz. markings in your score.
workflow
Linking and unlinking staff and part names in Sibelius
An essential element of Sibelius’s dynamic parts feature is the ability to make certain changes in a part without affecting the score. This extends to the ability to have different names for instruments in parts than what they are in the score. This useful feature has its intricacies and comes with a few caveats, so we’ll explain what those are and how to make the most of the available options.
Sibelius 2018.4 released with multi-edits for text, better note spacing, much more; re-brands as “Ultimate”
Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4, a broad release with many new features and some longstanding requests addressed. Areas of improvement include multi-edits for text, a new note spacing rule affecting multiple voices and other cases, deleting and adding bars at the beginning of the score, smarter ties, and many more other enhancements. Avid also announced a new naming strategy where the pro-level version is now called “Sibelius Ultimate”.
NAMM 2018: The Sibelius 2018.1 release is smarter with multi-edit workflow improvements
With its release coinciding with the opening of the 2018 NAMM Show, Sibelius 2018.1, the latest update to Sibelius, brings broad improvements to how users perform common tasks in Sibelius like placing slurs, hairpins, other lines, ties, special barlines, and a new note editing feature.
Supercharge your Finale workflow on Mac with Keyboard Maestro
Composer, arranger, and orchestrator Jeremy Levy shares his pro tips on using the macro program Keyboard Maestro to make the most of Finale. Examples and sample scripts included!
Solo staves for playback in Sibelius
Did you know that you can quickly solo staves for playback in Sibelius by making a passage selection and pressing P to play them?
Fermatas on bar rests in Finale
Here’s how to place fermatas on bar rests in Finale, and why placing them as articulations yields more consistent results than using expressions.
New and updated PDF utilities for music printing
Two new utilities for music printing are now available: PDF-MusicBinder and PDF-BatchStitch, which take the tedium of setting up PDF files for accordion-style and booklet printing and turn it into a one-click process. Updates to other PDF utilities are also available.
Don’t extract parts
Ever since Sibelius 4 introduced Dynamic Parts feature in 2005, and Finale 2007 followed in due course with Linked Parts a year later, I’ve hardly ever needed to extract parts from a Finale or Sibelius file — and you shouldn’t have to, either.
Preparing David Newman’s Matilda score for live orchestra
David Newman’s score to the 1996 Danny DeVito movie Matilda, with its energy, whimsy, and sweetness, is a favorite among film score enthusiasts. Learn what it took to prepare the music for a recent premiere with live orchestra.