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.

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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.

Testimonials - Sibelius Advanced

What’s Included

  • 5+ hours of video
  • Extensive step-by-step session notes
  • Links to extra resources
  • Professional development certificate
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Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this course for?

Teachers, composers and arrangers who are comfortable with the basics of using Sibelius. You know more than one note-entry method (ie. you don’t ONLY click notes into your score with the mouse), you’d like to work more quickly and effectively and you’d like to know how to tackle layout and formatting.

Is this course for beginners?

This course is for intermediate users of Sibelius. If you are a beginner, please take the Sibelius Basics course first.

What do I need?

A PC or Mac computer, internet access and a copy of Sibelius.

Which version of Sibelius is the course based on?

This course is based mostly on Sibelius 7, but explanations are also given for previous versions of Sibelius (which looks substantially different to version 7).

How do I access the course materials?

Once payment has been made, you will receive a login name and password to the online course materials area. All course videos and session notes are accessed online, via your internet connection.

How long do I have access to the course?

Access to this course is ongoing for as long as you have an active membership subscription to the Midnight Music Community.