Sibelius Projects for Students Online Course
Ideas for using Sibelius in the classroom
About this Course
During this 4-week online course we’ll look at a range of progressive notation-based activities (more than 35!) you can use with your students to listen to music, identify patterns, reconstruct songs, harmonise melodies, identify song form, compose original melodies, create rhythmic, melodic and harmonic variations on a melody and compose music to film.
The course will demonstrate adaptable activities that suit a wide range of student ages and levels of experience. Through these activities students will learn the elements of music, compose melodies, create accompaniments and arrange songs and gain an understanding of the way notation software works along the way.
You’ll also learn a series of insider teacher tricks: behind-the-scenes tips that will help you use Sibelius effectively (and successfully) with your students.
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
We’ll run through a series of adaptable activities that will suit Sibelius beginners of almost any age from Year 3 – Year 12 including:
- basic transcription and ear-training tasks
- easy ways to introduce compositional techniques like retrograde, augmentation, diminution, and inversion
- composing simple rhythmic accompaniments
- re-writing lyrics to a well-known piece
- adding or changing dynamics
- varying tempo and musical style
- experimenting with instrumentation
- using Sibelius playback for instant feedback
Behind-the-scenes teacher tips include: setting up Sibelius scores effectively for student use, ways to approach note input skills, quick copy and paste methods, entering text objects correctly in Sibelius to affect playback.
Use Ideas to:
- rebuild a song from a series of short “building blocks”
- create an accompaniment to a 3- or 4-chord pop song
- make your own minuet
- create a compositional scrapbook
Behind-the-scenes teacher tips include: learning all about the Ideas window; creating and capturing Ideas; editing Idea info; limiting access to Ideas.
We’ll cover:
- the role of music in films
- comparison different styles of music with the same movie scene
- how to import a movie into a Sibelius score
- how to create hit points in a score
- ways to use untuned percussion to mimic sound effects
- how match sounds to hit points
- playback and navigation shortcuts
- simple techniques for creating suspenseful music
- how to export and share student work
Behind-the-scenes teacher tips include: where to find copyright-free films for use in school projects, appropriate movie file types and editing videos for student projects.
- compose your own 12 bar blues, export from Sibelius and import into Acid, GB or Mixcraft to add own performance, or other drum parts
- step-by-step approach to teaching and writing drum notation: listen, transcribe, play, notate
- improvisation projects – create a backing for a jazz standard, then play and/or notate an improvised section over the top
- reharmonising a melody
- presentation of notated student compositions: common mistakes, formatting and layout tips, adding student commentary/narration, tracking compositional progress over time using Versions
- tips for teaching transcription: workflow, using audio software to slow down or transpose audio, shortcuts
Behind-the-scenes teacher tips include: exporting audio files, utilising the mixer, Versions, working with voices
*Midnight Music reserves the right to alter course content when necessary.