Bob Zawalich has written a number of new plug-ins in the last couple of months, many of which he has chronicled in his developer’s notebook posted last week. Among his latest creations is Position Rehearsal Marks, which is designed to center rehearsal marks at the start of a system horizontally over the clef.
For example, look at the part displayed below. By default, Sibelius’s Magnetic Layout feature strangely positions the rehearsal marks way too far to the right (to avoid the chords). Even if that wasn’t happening, the best we could hope for would be a rehearsal mark that appeared after the clef and key signature:
In many editions, especially in jazz and commercial music, it is customary for the rehearsal mark to be aligned with the left barline. (This is something that is easily achieved in Finale, by setting an expression’s justification to “Center” and its horizontal alignment to “Left Barline.”) However, Sibelius doesn’t allow this, as Bob explains in this helpful document. However, his plug-in can approximate the effect. It’s worth reading his explanatory document should you need to tinker with the settings to fine-tune your results.
Still, even by simply running the plug-in with its default settings, much more desirable results are easily achieved:
Position Rehearsal Marks may be downloaded directly through Sibelius 7 or 7.5 at File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins > Text. Users may also install it manually in Sibelius 6, 7 or 7.5 by visiting the plug-in download page and following the usual manual installation procedure, or by using the Install New Plug-in plug-in.
Kelly Fenton
The positioning of rehearsal marks has long been a pet peeve of mine with Sibelius, especially when there are chords present as in your example. I will definitely be utilizing this plug-in! Thanks, Bob, for the plug-in and thanks Philip for letting us know about it!
Derek Williams
This is very useful, and a further example of a plugin being needed to fix a misfeature, or provide an essential feature that should in the mainline code of the application.
Thank you Bob!
Bob
+1 re: both Kelly’s and Derek’s remarks
Thanks, Bob!
Charles
Thank you, Bob! This will really help with my charts.
carl barnett
As somebody who used to do a lot of handcopying the inability to move RMs except individually was very frustrating. This will save a lot of time and look neater. Thanks
Steve Aho
Thank you for making this very useful plugin!
It works great on rehearsal marks that were created using the command-R. However, the majority of album projects I work on need custom rehearsal marks (V1, Ch1, Bridge) rather than the default styles (A, B, C) that Sibelius offers. For that purpose I have created a text style based on rehearsal marks, but it does NOT seem to work (and be repositioned) with this plugin. Any tips?
bob zawalich
The plugin is designed to pick up Rehearsal Mark objects and also text objects that use the Rehearsal Marks text style, or any text style derived from Rehearsal Marks. It will only move text or Rm’s that are in the first bar in a system, and for text you should attach the text to the first beat in a bar before running the plugin.
Steve Aho
Thanks for the update!