Music 1770: Intro to Music Technology

Sibelius Project #1: A lead sheet

Preliminary: Installing and setting up Sibelius

Sibelius downloading instructions.

To get Sibelius to recognize your desired input (MIDI controller) and output (audio), you might have to do a little tweaking:

MIDI Input

If Sibelius doesn’t respond to your MIDI keyboard or other controller, first, make sure your controller is on and connected. If still not working, go to the Note Input tab of the ribbon, then select Input Devices > Find New Devices. Your controller should now appear in the dialog window; select it to make it active.

Output (playback)

Go to the Play tab and click the diagonal arrow in the Setup pane. In the dialog box that appears, click Audio Engine Options (bottom left) and select the desired output (headphone jack, built-in speakers, audio interface, etc.). If you hot-swap anything (plug or unplug devices while Sibelius is running) you may find you have to perform the selection above to get the desired device to sound.

Output (printing)

When you go to print, Sibelius has its own print dialog. Don’t attempt to use this unless you are doing a batch operation like printing multiple parts. Otherwise, Sibelius’s print manager often leads to weirdness. Instead, scroll to the bottom and select “Use OS Dialog”. This will take you to your computer’s normal print interface, where you can print or save as a PDF.

Input (keypad shortcuts)

Most laptop keyboards do not have a numpad (calculator keys) so you can’t use the keypad shortcuts as they were originally intended. However, all keyboard shortcuts in Sibelius can be re-assigned, and Sibelius comes with a factory preset of alternative laptop shortcuts for the keypad buttons. For instance, all the numpad numbers are re-assigned to the number-row keys at the top of the laptop keyboard.

If Sibelius didn’t already figure out that it was installed on a laptop, you can activate the laptop shortcuts by going to File tab > Preferences (or just ⌘-comma) > Keyboard shortcuts > Current feature set > Notebook (laptop) shortcuts

Assignment: Recreate a jazz lead sheet for “Just Friends”

Here is the leadsheet (PDF) you will be inputting: “Just Friends”
(And here is the leadsheet for in-class demo: “Till There Was You”)

Score Creation

File > Quick Start > Blank (can also use various stationery options)

Add a generic treble staff: shortcut is I for “instrument”

…But how do you find something, in general? Here’s how you could figure this out if I hadn’t just told you:
First, type “add instrument” in the ribbon searchbar
You could follow the path shown there and then click…but even better, instead of clicking:
…if you hover over the thing you want, the shortcut appears—use it!
…or you could just note the shortcut shown back in the initial search results
And if you didn’t see what you were looking for when you searched, try rewording—for instance, maybe Sibelius says “create” instead of add, or “staff” instead of instrument.

Change the House Style to “Jazz Inkpen 2”. If you didn’t do this in the Quick Start dialog, do it via: Appearance tab > House Style > Import…

Set the time signature and add a pickup bar of 2 beats


or by adding an “irregular” bar.
Note these key shortcuts:
⌘-B: new bar at end
⌘-shift-B: new bar anywhere (at current selection point, if present; otherwise, wherever you next click)
option-B: multiple or irregular bars

...Again, how could you find these commands if you didn’t already know?
Search “add bar” in the ribbon
Go where it says, then hover to see shortcut…or just note the shortcut shown in the search results

Note Input

Use the keypad (⌘-option-K) to enter the pitches and rhythm. Try using:

Slurs and ties

Slurs and ties are not the same. They differ in appearance (subtly) but also in behavior and playback. Slurs are a kind of line. In Sibelius, a line is anything that starts in one place and continues to another, whether it looks like a line or is even visible at all. This includes things like hairpin dynamic markings, ritards and accelerandos, pedal markings, first and second endings, etc. You can find slurs under the Notation tab > Lines dropdown pane (shortcut L; or shortcut S to create a slur directly). You can extend slurs by pressing the space bar.

Ties are found in the keypad. This makes sense, because they are a note-level event, like an accent mark or an accidental.

Triplets: First, enter the base note value (for instance, a quarter note if you want quarter-note triplets). Then select the first note or rest of the desired triplet group and go to Note Input > Triplets ... or simply ⌘-3

Beyond the notes…

Rehearsal Marks are in the Text tab; shortcut ⌘-R

Chord symbols are also under Text; shortcut ⌘-K.
You can advance to the next note by pressing the spacebar, or to the next measure by pressing the tab key.
Type mi, min, m for minor; ma or maj for major, etc. To get a flat, as in a min7b5 chord, type “b”. Sibelius does the formatting for you.

Note: Sibelius does not have an option to create chord symbols inside parentheses, like those in the pickup measure and the final measure. You can just omit the parens. (If you really cared, you could enter the parentheses as separate Plain Text.)

Lyrics are under Text; shortcut ⌘-L.
Pressing space bar (for new word) or using a hyphen (for the next syllable in the same word) will automatically advance you to the next note.

Always use the appropriate text styles!

Styles are responsive. They are not just customized for a certain appearance, but have specific behaviors as well. Expression text (dynamics) affects playback; Chord Symbol text transposes appropriately if you transpose a passage; etc. If you enter a dynamic or tempo using Plain Text, for instance, they will not only not have the typical appearance, they will not affect playback.

Layout

Musical scores combine the complexities of symbolic notation (similar to language) and graphical notation. As a result, layout is a deep and intricate topic, much more so than for (say) text documents. However, Sibelius’ default layout has gotten so good that at this introductory stage, you should need to do only minor tweaking to get the results you want.

Overlaps/collisions: If any elements (such as the opening rehearsal letter and tempo indication) are superimposed, you can just click and drag one of the elements vertically or horizontally.

Spacing: This is a deep topic in itself, but for this assignment all you’ll need to do is put the system (line) breaks in the right place, and Sibelius will adjust the spacing accordingly.

To force a line break: select the barline at the end of the desired last bar in a system, and hit return (just like in a text document!)

To force bars on different systems onto a single system: select the desired group of measures and type ⌘-shift-M (for Make into system)

To undo any such forced formatting: select the desired group of measures and type ⌘-shift-U (for Unlock format)

All these operations, and much much more, can be found in the Layout tab (often indicated by somewhat unintuitive or tiny icons).

Clean-up

⌘-clicking a measure will turn it purple, allowing you to delete (not just clear) any extra measures.

Finer points! (extra credit)

Edit the Chord Symbols text style to match the symbol format on the original lead-sheet: Go to the Text tab, then click the diagonal arrow in the Chord Symbols pane to customize.

Note that the following chord types on the lead sheet use a format that is different from the Sibelius defaults:
   MA7    MI7    MI7(♭5)
Try to match the original regarding upper vs. lowercase, superscript vs. baseline position, and use of letters vs. the symbols – or △ .

Key signature: The original PDF omits the key signature after the first line, a common practice for lead sheets. This is possible in Sibelius, but involves a workaround. You can try to figure it out if you like. (But the key signature must still be in effect, though invisible: in other words, all F’s should play back as F-sharp, but without the addition of a visible sharp.)

To get this extra credit, you must modify the appearance of the Chord Symbol text, not enter this text via some other (non-chord) text style. To do this, go to the Text tab, then click the diagonal arrow in the Styles pane to customize.

Submission

Create a PDF of your lead sheet: either via File tab > Export > PDF or via Print (⌘-P) > Use OS dialog (the bottom option) > Save as PDF.
Then email me (do not upload) both your Sibelius (.sib) file and your PDF file in a single email with subject “Lead Sheet”.

Grading

30 points possible:

We may not cover all the last items, but they’re not hard to figure out. While in general you should use the designated appropriate text style (Composer text for composer, Lyricist text for lyricist, etc.) you may have to do minor workarounds to get the desired appearance. As one example, Lyricist text in Sibelius is formatted by default to be left-justified, so if you want it to go to the right you will need to enter it as another kind of text, or add it as a second line of the “Composer” text.

Demo videos

If you missed class, you can watch the two videos below, following along with this Lecture Outline and this lead sheet. I recommend printing them out so you can free up your screen space for the video and for following along in Sibelius as I demonstrate.

These are legacy videos from an earlier version of the course, and some of the info (like the concern about the lab version being out of date) and details of the assignment itself are different, but the basic operations of the program as discussed in the videos are the same.

part 1

part 2