Top Catholic Songs – share, learn, promote

Today I am going to start a new series of tips. My goal is to create a single tutorial that will have as end result a great looking score, a midi export and parts. I did already some of those things in other newsletters, but now I want to bring all of this together in a way that will create a good workflow and that you can use every time you open a new score.

The biggest part in this Total Workflow is a section I call Object Check. In this section you will have to go through the score from beginning to end and fix EVERYTHING that is wrong: 1. Dynamics - 2. Slurs - 3. Note Spacing - 4. Fingerings - 5. Tuplets - 6. Beam direction.

Most of the time, these wrong things will have to do with position adjustment, but sometimes you will have to exchange a slur for a tie, increase the spacial placement of notes in a single bar, etc. The complete Workflow looks like this:

Part I: House Style import, Text adjustments, Pagination, Top & Bottom staff margins adjustments, Object Check (this is what I am starting today), Staff Spacings, Source score comparison and the Final Check.

Part II: Making the score midi export ready.

Part III: Creating the parts.

The reason that I start with Object Check first is because that is the biggest part and takes the most time to learn. When you know this part, the rest is easy! Now let’s start with…

Dynamics

When working with dynamics, there is a difference in where they are being placed in instrumental in vocal scores. For more information about dynamics and vocal scores, check out my blog post here: Sibelius 6 lyrics Quick Tip 3: Dynamics

Three rules to keep in mind with dynamics:

1. Place them always under the staff (except with vocal scores). This includes the grand staff used with for example a piano score where the dynamics have to be attached to the upper staff.

2. Align them horizontally as much as possible within one system.

3. In a grand staff, center the dynamics as much as possible between the staffs except when only one hand is playing, the dynamic can be placed closer to that hand’s part.

Two exceptions on rule one is when two parts share a staff and have different dynamics. For the upper voice place them above the staff, for the lower voice, place them below the staff. The same for the grand staff as used in keyboard music; when the left hand staff has its own dynamics, place those dynamics below that staff.

To quickly align the dynamics within a system, select those dynamics (which can be done selecting those bars and choosing from the menu Edit/Filter/Dynamics) and choose from the Layout menu Align in a Row.

I advice to use the keyboard shortcuts as much as possible to speed up your work-process. You can create your own keyboard shortcuts in Preferences/Menus and shortcuts/Edit/, choose Dynamics:

I assigned all the layout commands to the upper key row on my numeral keypad and I can hit them now without even looking at them.

To show the length of a dynamic change, use a dashed staff line from the Menu Create/Line/Staff Lines:

Don’t hyphenated the word, because when you change the spacing in the score afterwards, a hyphenated word will not adjust, a dashed line will.

Dynamics positioning: (note: the following positioning rules are taken from the virtualsheetmusic.com publisher’s House style and will differ with every publisher).

- Single character dynamics (P, F) are centered under the note head:

- Two character dynamics (PP, MP, MF, FF etc): the 2nd character is centered under the note head:

- Three or character dynamics (PPP, FFF, dim., cresc., etc.): center the complete dynamic under the note head:

In case the dynamic crosses a bar line because of its length, adjust it in a way it looks acceptable.

Hairpins are always placed straight and never angled. Begin and end them positioned correctly according to the instrument’s possibilities of changing dynamics. In a piano score, this is correct:

This is wrong:

With all of this said, have a look at the video below to see this newsletter this in action.

In the next newsletter I am going to talk about the correct placement of slurs. I hope you liked this tip and that it makes working in Sibelius 6 a little easier. Please let me know if you have any questions.

See you in the next tip!

all the best,
André