Sibelius Advanced Online Course
About this Course
Take your Sibelius skills to the next level with this online course for advanced users. Discover the best ways to layout and format your score whilst harnessing Sibelius’s powerful inbuilt formatting features.
Learn about house styles, how to create your own manuscript templates and tips for working with instrumental parts. We’ll tackle drum notation from scratch, playback tricks, setting up your own shortcuts, filtering, and time-saving plugins.
Course Format
This course is available when you join the Midnight Music Community. Membership to the Midnight Music Community gives you access to this course, and 11 other online courses, plus lesson plans, help and advice.
Course Outline
The Sibelius Advanced Online course will cover a range of skills, including the following:
- Revision of note-entry methods: Step-Time and Alphabetic entry
- Achieving success with Flexi-time (recording live from your MIDI keyboard)
- Using shortcuts to navigate your score quickly and easily
- Making use of multiple copy and paste methods
- Selecting, copying and pasting lyrics only
- Setting up custom shortcuts
- Filtering chord symbols
- Using the Multicopy feature
- Copying articulation to other parts
- Learning to love plug-ins
- Participant Q&A
- The importance of text in Sibelius
- Deciding which type of text to use
- All about tempo text and metronome markings
- Creating codas that play back correctly
- Handling repeats
- Controlling playback of specific notes/bars (“play first time only”)
- Setting repeat bar lines to play more than twice
- Playback of performance techniques such as pizz, arco and mutes
- Changing instrument playback sounds
- Participant Q&A
- Creating instant drum parts
- Writing drum parts from scratch
- Drum notation conventions
- Working with two voices on one stave
- Drum part note input the slow way
- Drum part note input the quick way
- Discovering which note head to use at which time
- When to write drum patterns in full and when to abbreviate
- Numbering of bars containing a repeated pattern
- Using the repeat bar sign
- Creating and using slash notation
- Indicating fills, play time, solos
- Working with swing style
- Creating orchestral percussion parts
- Participant Q&A
- Step-by-step approach to formatting your score
- Harnessing the power of Sibelius’s in-built formatting and layout tools
- Why you should (almost) never drag staves
- Using justification settings to your advantage
- Dealing with old scores: resetting everything to zero
- Altering staff size
- Avoiding collisions
- Hiding empty staves
- Making the final page a full page
- Creating parts
- Creating cues
- Copy the layout of one part to other parts
- Creating custom parts
- Course wrap-up
- Requests
- Participant Q&A
*Midnight Music reserves the right to alter course content when necessary.