Example Scores

We're fortunate to count amongst the Sibelius development team a number of gifted composers and musicians, which can greatly simplify the process of commissioning our example scores. For Sibelius 6, my colleague Tom Clarke contributed the Jazz.sib score, with which Sibelius users will no doubt be familiar. What you might not know, however, is that this very piece won Tom the Northern Underground Orchestra Young Arranger/Composer Competition in 2007. Here's how it sounds as performed by Tim Garland's Underground Orchestra:

Nacirema People by tomclarke

I was going to add a comment here involving the word "chops" but I don't have sufficient affinity with jazz to pull it off, so I'll let Tom's piece stand on its own...

Improvements to slurs in Sibelius 6.1

The recently-released Sibelius 6.1 free update is more than just a collection of bug fixes. My favourite improvement in this update is to slurs, which are now fully integrated with the new Magnetic Layout feature so that they can avoid collisions along their whole length. My colleague David Bignell worked tirelessly to fine-tune the behaviour so that slurs move intelligently out of the way when they collide with notes, articulations, accidentals and other objects, and the end result is so good that it has to be seen to be believed.

Here are some examples. Prior to v6.1, it was common to find slurs colliding with accidentals:

In v6.1, Magnetic Layout fixes this automatically:

Phrase marks over rising and falling passages were very ugly by default in earlier versions:

See how v6.1 elegantly solves this problem by increasing the curvature of the slur and moving the endpoints a little:


Adjusting slur arcs manually was always a slightly fiddly business, and can now be avoided entirely in most cases, saving you a massive amount of time when entering your score and making the score much more readable by default. I recently played a concert where the parts were prepared slightly hurriedly in an earlier version of Sibelius, and I couldn't help being distracted by several slur / accidental collisions. It's nice to think that these will no longer occur.

Improving the appearance of "Add Note Names to Noteheads" on stave lines

An anonymous commenter has pointed out a limitation of the "Add Note Names to Noteheads" plug-in in Sibelius. The problem is basically that the note name symbols don't have a white background, so whatever's behind the name itself will 'show through'. This gives the names a rather stencil-like appearance when on stave lines.

Hopefully this can be improved in the future (though as a disclaimer, I have no inside knowledge of any future plans in this regard!) For now though, there is an admittedly-complex workaround:

EDIT: Plug-in developer extraordinaire Bob Zawalich has already written a plug-in to automate this process. Download it here (and read more information about it at the bottom of this page).

1. Select the passage of notes to which you want to add note names. (I assume for the purposes of this workaround that they are all in voice 1.)
2. Choose Edit > Filter > Voices > Voice 1 Only.
3. Copy the notes to the clipboard (Edit > Copy, or CTRL-C).
4. Re-select the notes as a passage, like in step 1.
5. Choose Edit > Voice > Swap 1 and 3.
6. Run the plug-in to add note names on the selected notes (Plug-ins > Other > Add Note Names to Notehead).
7. Deselect everything by clicking on a blank part of the score (or pressing ESC).
8. Edit > Paste (or press CTRL-V), then click where the notes start with the mouse.
9. Now go to Edit > Color... and choose white (clicking OK to close the dialog).

You should now find that the stave lines behind the named notes are no longer visible. This works because voice 1 notes are drawn before voice 3 notes, so if you make them white then this effectively erases the background.

(Note that this workaround only works in version 5 or 6 of Sibelius, and requires the option "Hidden notes and rests don't affect stem directions and rests" to be switched on in Engraving Rules > Notes and Tremolos. This is because otherwise the voice 3 notes will have their stems forced up, which is not what you want.)

Sibelius 6

Now that Sibelius 6 has been launched, there's been quite a bit of discussion of the amazing major new features, so I thought it might be useful to give a few details of some of the more subtle but no less valuable improvements that I worked on during the development of Sibelius 6.

Articulation positioning. The new articulation positioning rule in version 6 is great. Stacks of articulations are now automatically split as required across magnetic slur end points, for situations where you have eg. a staccato and a bowing mark on the same note, and you can specify separately which articulations should go inside slurs and tuplets. Each stack can be dragged independently if required; in fact, each individual articulation can be dragged up and down, for those tricky special cases. Staccatos drawn inside the stave should now position correctly in all circumstances, and the various options for determining the vertical distance between notes and articulations now behave more consistently. All of this adds up to a massive improvement for those of us who require the highest engraving quality in their scores.

View > Handles. Making lots of graphical edits in a tight situation, and keep selecting the wrong item by mistake? Need to drag the right hand end of a system, but can't find where to click? Turn on this new option and all the click handles will be visible regardless of whether they are selected.

Dragging things when zoomed in a long way. One of my personal favourite improvements in v6. The threshold beyond which you have to drag in order to start moving an object is now fixed, irrespective of zoom level. This means that you can make fine adjustments with the mouse much more easily than before, because you don't have to drag halfway across the screen to get the thing to budge (and then drag back to the desired position). This has bothered me for years so it was nice to finally get the opportunity to sort it out. You'll also notice that click handles scale up sensibly at high zoom levels, so it's much easier to select a stem end when zoomed right in for example.

Slur subtleties. The slur improvements in v6 are a major selling point by themselves (full control over shape and thickness, more graceful default shape and much improved rule for determining whether they should go above or below the notes). Notice also however that the tapering of angled slurs is much improved in appearance, and that slurs now scale far more attractively on small staves or in cues.

Note-attached arpeggio lines. Adding an arpeggio could be a rather fiddly procedure in previous versions of Sibelius; you had to manually drag it out to the required length, and sometimes even add extra space before the note to allow for the line to fit without colliding. In version 6 this is all handled automatically from a new key on the keypad. These new arpeggios will take up the required space, and will grow and shrink as notes within the chord are added, removed or moved. They can also be fully adjusted manually, both vertically and horizontally, should you require it.

Cautionary accidentals. This doesn't really count, because it's a big feature in its own right, but a "gripe" I've heard from a few orchestral musicians when I tell them what I do for a living is that "Sibelius doesn't do accidentals correctly". This has never been true; the rules are that accidentals expire at the end of the bar in which they are stated, which is how Sibelius has always worked. However, to avoid sight reading mistakes and to reduce ambiguity it's customary to add extra accidentals in confusing situations, such as an F# in one bar followed by an F with no accidental in the next bar. Sibelius 6 does this automatically, and you can comprehensively control the circumstances in which cautionary accidentals get added via a welter of options. Furthermore, Sibelius will now restate accidentals on tied notes that cross a system break.

You can experiment with these and many more improvements by downloading the demo of version 6.

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