Using Sibelius Effectively

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Using Sibelius Effectively: A Guide to Sibelius Ultimate condenses years of experience and expertise using Sibelius into a thoughtful, practical 80-page e-book. Written in an easy-to-follow, engaging style, its focus is on helping you produce quality music notation from the program.

The three-part approach is presented as follows: Preparation, Making Notes (and more), and Useful Extras. The guide walks you through what do to before you even open Sibelius through the steps of putting items on the page, editing objects, laying out your music, and making parts.

Using Sibelius Effectively makes Sibelius accessible to the user who wants professional, practical guidance on making music that looks great, offering opinions and insider tips on the best approaches. The clarifying approach is laser-focused on music notation tips and tricks, and doesn’t digress into playback, video, or other Sibelius features that aren’t directly related to producing notated output. Author Luciano Williamson’s refreshingly honest take on Sibelius both unlocks its secrets but also doesn’t shy away from pointing out its flaws — and, in the latter instance, how to navigate around them.

This guide is the rare item that will appeal to both beginners and power users alike. Whether you find yourself learning something new, nodding along in agreement, or slapping your forehead and wishing you had imparted its wisdom years ago, Using Sibelius Effectively will up your Sibelius game.

Part 1: Preparation

• Background
• Before you open Sibelius
• Score setup
• Things to change immediately

Part 2: Making Notes (and more)

• Putting things on the page
• Editing and creating objects
• Layout
• Parts

Part 3: Useful Extras

• Miscellaneous useful advice
• Recommended reading
• Appendix: Keyboard shortcuts

Author’s introduction to the 3rd edition (2023)

Wow, Sibelius has changed a lot in the past couple of years! When this guide first went on sale we were still in the middle of Covid lockdowns, there was a once-in-a-lifetime event every other day, and (I think it’s fair to say) development on Sibelius had been stagnant for quite a while. I had intended to revise this guide after a few updates, assuming there would be only minor additions to include – alas, there have been many updates since January 2021, and there are major additions to the guide.

2021 began with Find in Ribbon becoming the new Command Search, and this alone could justify a new edition, as it brings even more tools right to the QWERTY keyboard, speeding up your workflow. Then we got Sibelius for iPad, followed soon after by Sibelius for iPhone – while not exactly suitable for professional engraving, I have used them to check on files while away from my computer. And of course, the workflows and innovations developed for these devices make their way back into the desktop versions in time.

2022 is the big year, however. Line improvements! Section headers! Staff names! Score subsets! I tried to test everything out for a new edition in early 2023 but then along came improvements to score subsets and independent dynamic parts – and here we are, at last.

In addition to the new features, I wanted to take the opportunity to rewrite some sections, fix a few spelling and grammar mistakes, and in particular further differentiate between my opinions and objective facts – things such as recommended line widths are useful but you don’t have to follow them, whereas it is still essential to know how to change these settings.

Throughout you may notice references to the stave have been swapped to the staff – this is to match Sibelius’ own descriptions, which are a curious mix of British and American terminology. I’ve also added Windows shortcuts throughout, alongside the Mac shortcuts present in the previous edition – all the shortcuts used will still be listed in the appendix for easy reference. Hopefully you’ll find this guide clearer and easier to use, despite being packed with more tips and tricks than ever. Inline musical symbols have been reformatted with Dan Kreider’s font MusGlyphs – if you think you’d benefit from such a font in your own work, you can find it here.

Lastly, a big thanks to everyone who bought the previous edition and used it, enjoyed it, showed it to their friends, and got in touch about it. Tapping away on a laptop in my childhood bedroom while the country went in and out of lockdown, I never expected this book would reach quite so many people. Please enjoy this new, 3rd edition.

Author’s note

This guide was originally written for the composition students at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, Wales. It began life as a lecture plan covering common tasks in Sibelius, but quickly grew out of control – it turns out Sibelius is a pretty comprehensive program!

This guide is not intended to replace a book on music notation (there are many fine examples of these, some of which you’ll find mentioned at the end [10. Recommended Reading] ), nor is it a thorough guide on every single feature in Sibelius3 (the Sibelius Reference Guide included with the software already exists, and it’s hundreds of pages long!); rather, this guide will walk you through the basic steps of creating and working on a new score in Sibelius the right (i.e. most effective) way, while ideally covering 90% of the things 90% of engravers need 90% of the time. We also aren’t too concerned with playback features, as while these are nice they aren’t necessary for engraving.

While I have my own (strong) opinions on many notation conventions, in this guide I am only interested in describing how to achieve the results you want in the most efficient and future-proof manner.

This guide is not aimed at, nor tested on, the “budget” Sibelius versions (Sibelius First, and Sibelius), as in my opinion these lack too many necessary features to be suitable for high-quality engraving.

This 3rd edition has been updated for the most recent version of Sibelius, which at the time of writing is 2023.6, although much of this guide will still apply to earlier (and future) versions.

— Luciano Williamson