One of our favourite interface improvements is the addition of some extra information and functionality in the Playback window. The Sibelius user community can also share their resources online at the site.
The internet is fully utilised here, enabling you to publish your worksheets so that students can fill them in or download them. These can be easily modified to suit your specific requirements.Īlternatively, you could use the tools to create your own from scratch and also create answer sheets to speed up the marking process. Sibelius 4 comes with 1700 ready-made worksheets, exercises and resources. If you're a music teacher, you'll find the new Worksheet Creator to be a real help.
So, for example, you could manually perfect your violin part and then copy its layout onto the other string parts. What's more, you can now make stylistic (layout) changes to one part and apply these to other instruments.
If you prefer, it's also possible to make changes that affect only the part or the score.
It's possible to switch the view between the full score and individual parts in real time and any updates made to either one will be effective in both. In essence, this means that Sibelius always treats a score as a collection of parts, so there's no need for separate part extraction. You can easily attach a video (in any format that's supported by your operating system) to a score (see the boxout for more on this).Īrrangers of music, especially of complicated multi-part scores, will love the new Dynamic Parts feature. It'd be impossible to list all of them here, so we'll highlight some of the biggest and most useful.Īnyone interested in multimedia work will be pleased to know that there's now support for video in Sibelius. Naturally, Sibelius 4 features dozens of changes and improvements throughout the program. Indeed, there's a shortcut for almost anything you might want to do, and it's in this area that Sibelius scores (ahem) over its rivals. It's all very easy and the shortcuts will help you to quickly transpose notes or phrases up and down, to re-spell accidentals, and to copy articulation marks or rhythmic patters. Once you've got some notes in, you're likely to use the intuitive copy and paste facilities to duplicate patterns and create sequences and the like. Although the system is clever and tries to deal with your inaccuracies, good results are not always guaranteed.įor composers and arrangers, Sibelius works beautifully as a 'musical word processor'. This last method is potentially the quickest, but does require accurate playing. These include: positioning them individually by clicking on the score (very slow) using the nifty keypad interface to specify the notes on the computer keyboard or a MIDI controller and enter them in step time (fairly quick) or employing the Flexitime system to play music in real time via an appropriate controller keyboard or other MIDI device. These have retained their translucency, which was added in the last version but will be new for anyone who's coming from version 2 or below.Īll the familiar methods of inputting notes remain. There are a few extra buttons and some additions to the existing floating palettes. Users of Sibelius 3 will find the new version's interface to be very similar to that of its predecessor, although there's been a certain amount of the apparently obligatory re-styling.