Music 1770: Intro to Music Technology

Sibelius Project #1: A lead sheet

Preliminary: Installing and setting up Sibelius

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

MIDI Input

Output (playback)

Output (printing)

Input (keypad shortcuts)

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”

Score Creation

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

• either in the Quick Start by choosing
  Pickup bar > Start with bar of length…
• or later, by creating a new time signature (shortcut T) with a pickup you set under
  More Options > Start with bar of length…

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

• Point/click—this is the slowest and least ergonomic method!
• Alphabetic (QWERTY) keyboard entry—slightly better
• MIDI keyboard with step input (using the keypad to select note values)—much, much better!
• MIDI keyboard using flexi-time (real-time) input–great if you have the keyboard fluency
  Just as when recording MIDI in a DAW, you can enter the music at any tempo:
  ⌘-option-Y opens the Playback controls, where you can adjust the playback/record tempo with the slider.

Slurs and ties

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…

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!

Layout

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

Finer points! (extra credit)

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

Grading

• 18 pts: All notes and rhythms entered correctly, including ties, rests, accidentals, tuplets; correct pickup measure
• 2 pts: No trailing extra bars
• 2 pts: Correct chord symbols
• 3 pts: Lyrics entered with proper alignment and correct use of hyphens and lyric extension lines (if present)
• 2 pts: Line breaks and and layout as in the original, and any rehearsal letters
• 2 pts: All other text notated as closely as possible to the original: title, composer, lyricist, copyright notice
• 1 pt: PDF file of score submitted in addition to Sibelius (.sib) file
• Extra credit: Chord symbol format matches original
• Extra credit: Key signature hidden after first line, but notes are still correct, i.e. play back at correct pitch

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

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