Sibelius Blog

Sibelius helps Scarsdale students score hits for elementary orchestra

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:11:37 +0000

Student Andy Sherman and teacher Jessica Elkhatib use Sibelius 7 on an interactive whiteboard (Photo: Mark Chapman)

The Scarsdale Daily ran a story over the weekend about a joint effort between Quaker Ridge Elementary School and Scarsdale High School in Scarsdale, New York to provide the elementary students who play in the school’s orchestra with some exciting new arrangements of songs by Bruno Mars, Adele and OneRepublic.

Andy Sherman, a junior at Scarsdale High School, is working an internship with Quaker Ridge music teacher Jessica Elkhatib in the month of January, and is using Sibelius 7 to produce the arrangements for the orchestra. From Mark Chapman’s article:

As for the Quaker Ridge project, Sherman said he has just started using Sibelius software, which allows for fast musical notation, but he is more familiar with Logic Pro, which he calls “a much more confusing program, more for recording.”

The Sibelius program, which is being introduced to the elementary pupils, also allows for copying and pasting, instant transposition – lowering or raising the music to a different key – and changing instrumentation such as converting a flute part, for instance, into a violin part. The software makes it easy, for instance, to combine two pop songs – “Secrets” and “Someone Like You” – into a medley to take advantage of their similar bass lines, Elkhatib said.

“We are having a great time,” she said, “and really learning a lot.”

It’s always great to see Sibelius being used in schools, and especially with children as young as elementary or primary students. If you know of any other great projects like this one, please get in touch!

Sibelius 7 scores Software Line of the Year award for 2011

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:47:41 +0000

This past weekend at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, the winners of the 19th annual Music Merchandise Retailer Dealers’ Choice Awards were announced, and I’m delighted to report that Sibelius 7 won the Software Line of the Year award for 2011.

These awards were voted for by more than 650 retailers, so it’s especially gratifying to see that Sibelius 7 was chosen by the people who are out there selling software to musicians every day.

In their comments, MMR Magazine said of Sibelius 7:

Versatile enough to meet the needs of beginning students as well as professional-level composers, this latest generation of Avid’s iconic music notation software scored a solid hit in 2011.

Avid products picked up a total of six awards over the course of the NAMM weekend, with Pro Tools, Pro Tools HD Native and VENUE all sharing in the honours. We’re thrilled that Sibelius 7 has been honoured with this award, and we’re looking forward to another year of delivering great products to our customers.

Tina Andersson scores Abbey Road Anthem Competition win with Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:41:49 +0000

In March of last year, I posted about a competition being run by Abbey Road Studios in London to celebrate the historic studio’s 80th birthday. Eight winners were eventually chosen from more than 900 entries, and of course many of the entries were composed or prepared in Sibelius. One of the winners is an anthem called The Angel by composer Tina Andersson from Gothenburg, Sweden. Read on to find out more about Tina, and hear her winning entry in its entirety.

Tina divides her work time between working in the music library at the Gothenburg Opera and working as a freelance arranger/orchestrator and music engraver. The score for The Angel was produced in Sibelius 6, though Tina is now working with Sibelius 7. After studying flute at Gothenburg University Tina became a professional flute player in the Gothenburg Wind Orchestra. Tina has also worked as a conductor with wind bands, choirs and youth orchestras.

Tina was overwhelmed when she heard that her anthem was one of the winning entries in the competition. “When you realize that Eric Whitacre’s voice is on your phone, letting you know that they are head over heels in love with your music, your whole world changes,” she said.

You can download a PDF of the sheet music for The Angel (and see the sheet music for two of the other winning entries, also both produced in Sibelius), and listen below to the recording (to hear all of the winning entries, head over to SoundCloud).

Congratulations to Tina on your win, and indeed to all of the other winners!

Sibelius helps young composers’ works to the stage in Carnegie Hall

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:45:51 +0000

David Robertson conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (Photo courtesy Chris Lee)

Every year the Weill Music Institute, Carnegie Hall’s music education and community programming arm, presents a Creative Learning Project as part of its program season. In just a few weeks, works by a trio of young composers—Gabriel Smallwood from Florence, South Carolina, Anthony Constantino from Tucson, Arizona and Thomas Reeves from New York City—will be performed live at Carnegie Hall on 5 February 2012, to be directed by David Robertson.

I caught up with Samantha Nemeth from Carnegie Hall to find out more about this project and how Sibelius has played a part in helping these young composers bring their music to the stage.

These projects are built around major pieces of repertoire like Bernstein’s Mass, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Orff’s Carmina Burana. One of the main goals of these projects is to take a large group of New York City student performers and, in as many ways as possible, raise their performance to a professional level. The other main goal is to give students an opportunity to learn more about the featured repertoire through creating their own compositions that are connected in some way to the central repertoire.

“For our Carmina Burana Choral Project, we knew we were going to have an orchestra and chorus already assembled to perform Orff’s masterpiece. We thought this would be an ideal opportunity for three young composers to work with the same materials that Orff had when he wrote Carmina Burana. Conductor David Robertson, who has been involved with shaping this project, also recommended that our selected composers work with some of the same musical tools that Orff employed, namely static and rhythmic drones, hocketing and homophonic choral writing. We are sharing these new works with the young singers through blog posts and videos by the young composers and we have already started to see how meaningful it is for students to see their peers grappling with some of the same questions as Carl Orff.”

One of the other main collaborators for this project is composer Thomas Cabaniss. He has been mentoring the three young composers as they work on their new pieces. He explains why Carmina Burana was chosen as the stimulus for this project:

“It is tempting to think that high school musicians might be inspired by the history of Carmina Burana, or by its use of ancient texts, or even by the ways that its orchestral textures have been borrowed by Hollywood film composers for the movies. But it’s probably more accurate to say that young musicians—just like their older counterparts—are thrilled by the visceral impact.”

Samantha says, “In our first meetings with the young composers and also our first rehearsals with the 250-person choir, it has been the powerful, clear emotional impact of Carmina Burana that has proven most impressionable. If you listen closely to the newly composed works, you will hear that the three selected composers have all tapped into a strong emotional feeling in their work. For high school students, they are really laying it all on the line!”

Philip Rothman of New York Music Services has been preparing the parts to be used in performance, naturally using Sibelius—and each of the young composers was also already using Sibelius. I asked Samantha how Sibelius had fitted into the workflow of the project.

“When we started this project, we didn’t require the composers to use any specific software for their compositions,” she told me. “It turns out, though, that all three of the selected composers use Sibelius to notate and develop their works. Philip Rothman is a wonderful engraver and the transfer of the finished orchestral scores to him from the composers has proven to be a piece of cake. I never had to facilitate any conversations about which versions of the software the young composers were using, it all just worked out. So, I guess you could say that the Sibelius software has been invisible in a good way! We have been able to concentrate on supporting the creation of these new works and bringing them to life on the stage.”

The concert takes place at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 5 February. As of the time of writing, tickets are still available!

Come and see Sibelius at The NAMM Show 2012

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:35:43 +0000

The convention centre in sunny Anaheim, CA

Today marks the start of the winter NAMM Show at the convention centre in Anaheim, California. Naturally, Avid is there with its usual impressive stand in Hall A, Booth 6700, which is found right inside the main doors to the hall. You can check out Sibelius 7 and Avid’s other music and audio solutions both on the main stage and by walking up to the various pods on the stand.

If you’re not in the music trade, or can’t be in California this week (like me!), you can still keep up with all of the happenings on and around the Avid booth by checking out the special NAMM Show page on the Avid web site. There won’t be any specific Sibelius-related announcements at the show – we prefer to wait until products are shipping, rather than, say, hyping stuff up for weeks on our Twitter feed, and then putting out a press release containing scant details of a new product, with no information about availability or pricing, and precious few details about its functionality. We do have some very cool and completely unique things in the pipeline for the year ahead, but we’ll keep them under wraps until they’re ready for you to get your hands on them.

If you’re planning to be at the NAMM Show, do stop by the Avid booth and say hello to the good people who will be working the show, braving crowds, noise and a lack of anywhere decent to sit down for the next four days along with you!

John Ashton Thomas on using Sibelius to score more than 50 films

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:13:15 +0000

John Ashton Thomas in the control room during the recording of the score for Ice Age 2

Composer, orchestrator, arranger and educator John Ashton Thomas has worked on some huge Hollywood hits over the years, arranging or orchestrating for more than 50 films since 2005 – and he has used Sibelius for every one of them. I caught up with John to find out more about his work and the part Sibelius plays in it.

“I’ve been using Sibelius since 2005 when I first orchestrated for a Hollywood film,” he told me. “The score was Robots, composed by John Powell. I learned the software whilst working on this project. I’ve always found Sibelius intuitive, and have found it easy to do things on it that I’ve never done before.”

John started his musical career as a chorister at Exeter Cathedral, and later studied Composition and Piano at Trinity College of Music in London. After graduation, he taught in Liverpool and London–including at both his alma mater, Trinity College, and at the Royal Academy of Music–while keeping up a career as a pianist, and in the early 1990s he began writing music for film and TV.

In 2001, he teamed up with fellow Trinity College alumnus John Powell to work on the music for Rat Race, thus beginning a collaboration that has continued ever since.

“Since 2005 I’ve used Sibelius for every film score I’ve worked on, including Ice Age 2 and 3, Night at the Museum and its sequel, the 2009 3D version of A Christmas Carol, X-Men: First Class and about 50 others,” he told me. “A number of other Hollywood orchestrators I know use Sibelius, and a number have switched to Sibelius in the last few years: they have found it easy to use, and quicker than other notation programmes they’ve used.”

As an orchestrator on a film, preparation of instrumental parts is left to somebody else, but in his work as a composer for Universal’s music library or when writing concert pieces for live performance, he checks over the parts himself prior to printing. “On the occasions that I’ve prepared my own parts for concert pieces, I’ve found that process very quick and straightforward.”

John still does occasional work at Trinity College in London, and he says, “Sibelius seems to be the programme of choice for the next generation of music writers: I have not come across any music students who use any other notation program.”

Check out John’s web site for more information about his work. His latest collaboration with John Powell, Happy Feet Two, is still in cinemas in the UK, and another collaboration, with composer Henry Jackman for Dreamworks Animation’s Puss in Boots, is also still in selected screens.

Sondheim’s Company brought back to the stage with a little help from Sibelius

Daniel Spreadbury — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:43:09 +0000

Photo: © Donald Cooper/Photostage

Tomorrow night marks the final performance of a revival of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Company, at the Crucible in Sheffield. The run, which started at the end of November last year, has been critically-acclaimed, drawing a five-star review from the Daily Telegraph. Dominic Cavendish called it “unmissable” and said:

Jonathan Munby’s world-class revival reminds us why Sondheim is hailed as a genius. With an experimental, non-linear book by George Furth, Company is both of its time – capturing an age of greater innocence and sexual exploration – and ahead of the game. As long as we must weigh the pleasures and agonies of solitary freedom over the comforts and corrosive effects of cohabitation, this ingenious, soul-searching piece will sing to us in the most haunting and wittily acute way.

I spoke to Simon Hale, who worked as the orchestrator on this latest revival. “This is a new production and so the director and theatre wanted new orchestrations to give it a fresher feel whilst also keeping it in New York in 1970, where it is set,” he told me. “The 1995 Donmar production was a more chamber version musically than the original but I wanted to give it a band sound at times, sometimes make it James Brown and also reflect the influence of Philip Glass/Steve Reich of the period in some of the arrangements.”

Simon, naturally, produced the scores and parts for the show using Sibelius 7, and is really pleased with how everything turned out. “We’ve had fantastic reviews, so fingers crossed that it might have another incarnation after this,” he said.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed for director Jonathan Munby and the rest of his team that Company may yet be transferred to the West End and allow a wider audience to experience the show in this wonderful production.

Film composer Ryan Leach on Sibelius: “It’s so much easier than Finale”

Daniel Spreadbury — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:00:19 +0000

Film composer Ryan Leach has posted on his blog a list of the software he uses in his studio for his work on commercial films, TV and video game projects. He’s been involved for some time with Remote Control Productions, Hans Zimmer’s music production shop, and was assistant on movies including The Dark Knight and The Simpsons Movie, and more recently his soundtrack for the independent movie Devils Racecourse won the 2010 Maverick Movie Award for Best Original Score.

Ryan has used both Sibelius and Finale, which he learned when he was a student at Berklee, and says:

My favorite notation software is Sibelius by a mile. Like Digital Performer, I learned and used Finale at Berklee. But after trying out Sibelius a few years ago I never looked back. It is so much easier to use than Finale, it’s unbelievable. Everything just works the way it’s supposed to. I used to spend hours and hours with parts in Finale making sure things didn’t overlap. Sibelius has a simple rule – things can’t overlap! God that saves so much time!

Check out Ryan’s site and his work. It’s great to see that the up-and-coming generation of music professionals are choosing the world’s best-selling music notation software!

If you’re currently using Finale or another notation program and you’d like to give Sibelius a try, a free 30-day trial is available from the Sibelius web site, and special crossgrade pricing is available if you decide you’d like to trade up.

Electronic Musician reviews Sibelius 7: “More intuitive” and “outstanding sounds”

Daniel Spreadbury — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:40:05 +0000

The January 2012 issue of Electronic Musician magazine carries a review of Sibelius 7 from renowned percussionist and composer Gino Robair,

I’m delighted to report that Gino loves Sibelius 7, and has good things to say not only about the new task-orientated user interface sported by the new version, but also loves the new Sibelius 7 Sounds library that is included with the software.

Here are a couple of choice quotes from the review. On the ribbon:

Not only is the Ribbon great for beginners, longtime users will likely find features they didn’t know existed in Sibelius.

On Sibelius 7 Sounds:

The sound library, which spans three DVDs, is top-notch across the board.

And in summary, he concludes:

Sibelius 7 should be a no-brainer for newbies and previous owners alike. Not only is the sound library outstanding, the new text and graphics features, combined with the simplified interface, make it easier than ever to create great-looking scores.

Thanks to Gino and EM for the review! You can read it in full on the Electronic Musician web site, or pick up the January 2012 issue of the magazine from the newsstand now.

Sibelius 7.1 update now available

Daniel Spreadbury — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:54:56 +0000

As an early Christmas present to all Sibelius 7 users, we are pleased to make available a new, free update today, bringing the program to version 7.1. This update includes nearly 200 bug fixes and improvements, including support for automatic duplexing in printing, improvements to PDF export workflow, support for DirectWrite for ClearType anti-aliasing and precise text positioning on Windows, support for automatic sound loading in Kontakt 5, and more besides.

Sibelius 7.1 is also the second of Avid’s products to move to its new unified software activation system, after last month’s release of Media Composer 6. This new system will be rolling out across all of Avid’s software products over the coming year.

Read on for more information about the Sibelius 7.1 update, but if you want to get straight down to business, here are the links you need:

Alternatively, you can simply open any score in your copy of Sibelius 7, then click Check For Updates on the Help page of the File tab.

Printing

Printing has been overhauled more in Sibelius 7 than in any previous version of the program, and there have been some teething problems, to be sure. Over the past few maintenance releases we’ve fixed a lot of issues that have been reported by users, and with Sibelius 7.1 we have made further progress.

The biggest news is that Sibelius 7.1 now supports automatic duplexing, if your printer supports it. The menu in Sibelius’s File > Print page that contains Print One Sided and Manually Print Both Sides will now also contain an extra item, Automatically Print Both Sides.

This option will only appear if your printer has an auto duplexer

Choose this to enable automatic duplexing. Note that Sibelius can’t tell how the paper feeds through your printer, so a Duplex Options dialog has also been added, which you can access via a link directly below the menu of available printers in which you can choose whether your printer turns paper on the long edge or the short edge when printing in either portrait or landscape orientation. Until you have set this up properly, you may find that pages print upside-down on the reverse side of each sheet of paper, but once you’ve set it up once, it’s remembered for that printer thereafter, so you only need to do it once.

We’ve also made improvements to the way that Sibelius interfaces with the native Print dialog on Mac, which is accessible from the Use OS Dialog button at the bottom of Sibelius’s File > Print page, or by way of a keyboard shortcut (if you assign a shortcut to the OS Print Dialog feature in the File tab category on the Keyboard Shortcuts page of Preferences). The settings in the native Print dialog now take precedence over the settings in Sibelius’s File > Print page, so if you want to use the native options instead of Sibelius’s options, that’s now possible.

One potential pitfall to know about: the settings on the Page Attributes, which is the first page that appears in the native Print dialog, are defaulted using the values in Document Setup (i.e. your score or part’s page size and orientation), rather than the values in Page Setup (i.e. the paper size on which you eventually want the score or part to be printed). If you want to scale the score or part for any reason when printing, e.g. for 2-up printing of a range of pages, then you should set the destination paper size on the Paper Handling page of the Print dialog, by switching on the Scale to fit paper size checkbox.

PDF export

Sibelius 7.0.3 and earlier included a slightly awkward compromise for the export of a selection of parts as PDF: you could choose all parts or just one part to export in File > Export > PDF, but if you wanted to make a selection of parts export as PDF, or have greater control over the filenames of the resulting PDFs, you would have to go to Parts > Extract > Extract and export the PDFs from there.

As of Sibelius 7.1, it’s now possible to do everything directly from the File > Export > PDF page. There are new options to export a selection of parts, either as a single file or separate files, and you can also now determine the filenames of the exported PDFs using tokens.

Making a selection of parts in File > Export > PDF

We’ve also added a new plug-in to export a folder of scores to PDF, courtesy of plug-in wizard Bob Zawalich. You can find this at Home > Plug-ins > Batch Processing > Export Folder of Scores as PDF. This mirrors much of the functionality of Sibelius’s own File > Export > PDF page, so you can export the full score and parts either as separate files or concatenated together per score, and automate some otherwise quite laborious workflows.

Display improvements on Windows

Sibelius 7.1 now uses DirectWrite as its drawing engine on Windows, which means that it can now render text using ClearType smoothing with sub-pixel glyph positioning. This is all very technical, but what it means is that text now looks crisper and better than ever on screen at all zoom levels in Sibelius, with subtle but significant improvements to the positioning of individual characters in a run of text.

ClearType smoothing uses colour fringing to improve the appearance of text. As Wikipedia says:

ClearType [sacrifices] one aspect of image quality (color or chrominance detail) for another (light and dark or luminance detail). The compromise can improve text appearance when luminance detail is more important than chrominance.

So if you look really closely (e.g. if you zoom in really close) you’ll see that the pixels around the outside of each character are different shades of light red, green and blue, instead of just shades of grey, which is the standard anti-aliasing technique used in previous Windows technologies.

You could go crazy reading about the differences between the various ways of rendering text on Windows and Mac OS X (here’s an informative blog post at Typekit, for example), but suffice it to say that Sibelius 7.1 now uses the latest and greatest typography technologies on Windows and Mac for the best possible on-screen appearance of text in your scores.

And in case you missed this improvement from Sibelius 7.0.3, if you don’t like the effect of using sub-pixel anti-aliasing for straight lines like staff lines and barlines, which can appear to be grey at certain zoom levels, you can switch off anti-aliasing for straight lines on the Display page of Preferences.

Unified activation and licensing

Avid is moving all of its software products across to a common software activation system, which will hopefully make it easier for people who use multiple Avid products to keep track of their software entitlements, and ensure that they don’t have to deal with many different software activation schemes for their different products. Media Composer 6 was the first product to make use of the new system when it was released in November, and now Sibelius 7.1 is the second product to make the switch.

When you run Sibelius 7.1 for the first time, you’ll need to activate it again: you’ll be given a new System ID (which replaces your old Sibelius serial number from now on) and Activation ID (which enshrines your entitlement, e.g. how many computers you can activate Sibelius on, any free upgrade entitlement you might have because you have a student license of the software, etc.). Activation is carried out using the new Avid License Control application, which is common to all applications using the unified activation system.

Avid License Control

You can read all about the development of the unified activation scheme in Rich Gianattasio’s behind-the-scenes blog. Specific information of interest to existing Sibelius users can be found in this Help Center article.

Sibelius 7 Sounds update

We’ve also released a further update to the Sibelius 7 Sounds library to accompany Sibelius 7.1, which includes a number of further fixes and improvements to tuning, balance and articulations, plus making the “lite” sounds lighter still to make them load faster and consume less RAM when in use. You can read the full list of changes, and download the update, here.

Plug-in dialog editor

Perhaps of lesser interest to most people, but of great interest to the community of plug-in developers, Sibelius 7.1 also reinstates the ManuScript plug-in dialog editor, which has been missing on Windows since Sibelius 7.0, and has never been included in Sibelius for Mac. Now the plug-in dialog editor is back, and for the first time it’s available on Mac as well.

The ManuScript plug-in dialog editor, now on Mac

The dialog editor is considerably more useable than it has been in previous versions of Sibelius, with time-saving improvements such as the ability to align controls, access their properties by double-clicking, nudge their positions with the arrow keys, and so on. If you’re a plug-in developer, the new plug-in dialog editor will make your life considerably easier. (And there are a few other improvements to ManuScript in Sibelius 7.1, including access to PDF export, and a handful of other things.)

For more information about the changes in ManuScript in Sibelius 7.1, see the updated ManuScript Language Reference PDF.

Get started

If you’ve not yet upgraded to Sibelius 7, now’s a great time to jump in. Sibelius 7.1 has all of the amazing new features of Sibelius 7, plus several hundred fixes and improvements accumulated from Sibelius 7.0.1, 7.0.2 and 7.0.3, and the hundreds more in Sibelius 7.1. If you haven’t tried Sibelius 7 yet, the 30-day trial version has been updated to Sibelius 7.1 as well. If you buy an upgrade from our online store as a download, it will be Sibelius 7.1 from today (the software will be updated on DVD as well, but it won’t be available until early next year).

If you’re already using Sibelius 7, you should update as soon as you’ve finished your current project (never update in the middle of a project!). You can find the download in the Sibelius Help Center.

Sibelius Blog

Sibelius helps Scarsdale students score hits for elementary orchestra

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Tina Andersson scores Abbey Road Anthem Competition win with Sibelius

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Sibelius helps young composers’ works to the stage in Carnegie Hall

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Sondheim’s Company brought back to the stage with a little help from Sibelius

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Film composer Ryan Leach on Sibelius: “It’s so much easier than Finale”

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Electronic Musician reviews Sibelius 7: “More intuitive” and “outstanding sounds”

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Sibelius 7.1 update now available

Printing

PDF export

Display improvements on Windows

Unified activation and licensing

Sibelius 7 Sounds update

Plug-in dialog editor

Get started

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