Finale’s possibilities are truly astronomical, and its settings can seem like a black hole. Jason Loffredo boldly navigates the Finale frontier of space — music space, that is — with a down-to-Earth explanation of its constellation of features to help you reach for the stars.
Detective Jason Loffredo is back with the Conquering Finale video series. His “Special Tools Investigation” will dissect each one of these tools, perform forensic analysis, and present evidence that you have access to a powerful array of engraving tools for individual notes and measures.
The Sibelius plug-in Create Tuplets Different Units automates the entire process of creating a tuplet where the “numerator” and “denominator” do not share an equivalent unit, such as two quarter notes in the space of three eighth notes.
The impressive plug-in Flip Selected Notes makes it easy to flip or force the stem direction of notes and beamed groups in Sibelius.
The Create Trailing Pseudo-Grace Notes plug-in for Sibelius automates a detailed method for creating grace notes at the end of a bar using tuplets, as a workaround for Sibelius’s limitations in that area.
It is not unusual to encounter grace notes at the end of a bar — that is, before the barline. Entering this variety of grace note in Sibelius is a chore, but there is an approach which involves using tuplets to achieve good results.
The downloadable Sibelius plug-in Fill With Tied Notes fills the bars between the first selected note or chord in a staff and either a second selected note, or the end of the selection, with tied copies of the first selected note, using the pitches, voice, and notehead styles of the first notes.
When the need arises to parenthesize notes, you might resort to methods such as manually placing text or symbols. What you may not know is that placing notes in parentheses in Sibelius is much easier than that (and downright fun, too).
Tone clusters are a shorthand notation for several adjacent notes played at once. In this comprehensive post, we’ll discuss many different ways to represent tone clusters in a notated score, and how to achieve those results in Sibelius.
Dorico makes it quite easy to preface a score with reference pitches, such as timpani tunings or handbells. In this post we’ll walk through the process of creating reference pitches using flows and frame chains.