A philosophy to help you be lazy, efficient, and future-proof your scores, or: Why have Sibelius and bark yourself?
Hey, just a heads-up: this was originally posted on my old website in 2018. I’m moving all my old blog posts to this fancy new site!
Being lazy isn’t something to be proud of in almost all situations, but on occasion it does have benefits. “Work smarter, not harder,” they say, and they’re right; after all, some guy in the 19th century was too lazy to tabulate polynomial functions by hand, so he invented the computer (I’m aware that might be a bit of an oversimplification, but the point still stands).
So what does this have to do with using Sibelius? I’d like to share with you a golden rule I’ve devised over the last few years using the program, that has helped me speed up my engraving massively, as well as allowed me to make adjustments to my scores months later with great efficiency:
If I have to do the same task three times, there’s probably a better solution.
Let me give you an example. Four years ago I wrote a musical theatre song cycle with a lyricist friend, 12 songs that needed typesetting. I knew the conventions of musical theatre vocal scores, and I also knew there must be a way to automate adding the catalogue information (song title, show title, number, writers) in the right position with the right design without doing it all manually each time. Thus, I discovered house styles, and how to create new, custom ones. By spending the time at the start to create new text styles that would automatically apply the design and position I wanted, I saved myself a lot of time later on.
The song title was automatically bold and underlined, and the show title and song number were always placed on the right, above the composer/lyricist info, with the correct design (bold/boxed). This saved a lot of time after the first couple of songs.
These aren’t the only things that can be achieved with a house style, though. Since this song cycle I’ve created new symbols and new lines, changed a lot of default fonts, adjusted bracket design, replaced individual accidentals and clefs with various other music fonts to have all the best versions, and more. Making all of these adjustments to every new score I create would take a very long time, but by making the changes below the surface and exporting a continually-evolving house style, they all happen automatically.
Really, that’s the thing you should consider when making an adjustment: can you apply it at a deeper level? For instance, selecting the title of a piece and changing the font doesn’t seem a like a lot of work, but if you make the same change for every piece you write it becomes wasteful. Take the time now to adjust the default title font, and it’ll pay off. The same goes for the text size; messing with it on a surface level can cause problems when you come to make parts.
There’s one other efficiency tip I’d like to touch on: text wildcards. These bad boys will save you so much time if you use them right. In essence, they’re shortcuts for writing common information in your score.
Select your score title, remove all the letters, and replace it with “\$title\”. Click away and watch as it magically reverts to your original title (if it doesn’t, you probably didn’t enter a title when you set up the score; go under the File menu and add it into the info box). Neat, huh? Right now you’re probably thinking, “but that’s just extra work to get the result I already had.” Well, yes, at the moment it is, but hold on. In a typical score you’ll have the title on the title page, top of the first page, bottom of every subsequent page as catalogue info, and the title page of all your parts. Suppose you finish engraving your score and decide at the last minute you want to change the title? If you’ve written it out every time it could take you quite a while to change it, but if every instance is a wildcard you only have to change it once, at the root, and it’ll change everywhere. The same goes for composer, lyricist, dedication, subtitle etc. Wildcards become infinitely valuable when it comes to cataloguing parts; \$partname\ copied and pasted is so much more efficient than writing it out on the title page of every part. In fact, I don’t write anything on part title pages - I open a previous score and copy all the text from it. As it’s all made from wildcards, it automatically updates to the info of the new score. The same happens with the catalogue information I put at the bottom left corner of every page of music, both parts and full score; copy and paste it from the last score I had open, and it changes automatically.
I’ll end with a few top tips:
In almost every situation, make adjustments at as deep a level as you can. Why waste time increasing the size of all your tempo marks one by one when you can adjust the whole default tempo style?
Use the \$dateshort\ wildcard everywhere; I’ve ended up with several printed copies of the same piece before, all different revisions, and having them labeled clearly with the date has been essential in working out which version is the most correct one. Having Sibelius take care of this by automatically adding the current date means one less thing you have to think about.
Check out the plug-ins. Sibelius ships with loads, and you can download more. These have been written specifically to automate various processes, including adding accidentals to every note, adding l.v. lines, merging bars etc. Before grumbling about how much adjusting you have to do, check to see if there’s a plug-in for it. Thanks to the hard work of the great and merciful Bob Zawalich, there usually is.
Making a new house style sounds like a lot of work for little immediate reward, but I promise it’s worth it in the long term. Set aside a day to get all the basics out of the way - text styles, music fonts, score designs etc. As you write new pieces you’ll continue to build upon it; remember to export the house style from the last piece you wrote so you can import it into the next, and keep all the changes you made.
The fewer changes you make, the easier it will be to change them again. Approach everything with the mindset that you might want to change it later down the line. If you’ve made a hundred manual adjustments that you now realise were incorrect, you’re going to waste a lot of time fixing them. For a great computer programming analogy, check out this video from Tom Scott.
Invest in Behind Bars and keep it by your computer at all times. It’s worth it.
There are some great websites that offer tips to overcome problems like these in all the major engraving programs. Often you’ll find solutions to problems you didn’t realise you had, and you’ll be amazed at how useful the solution is. I regularly check Of Note and Scoring Notes, and you should too. The Sibelius Forum is also a great place to check if you have a specific problem. (And of course, don’t forget to return to this blog in the future!)
I hope these tips were helpful. Got any suggestions of your own, or questions? Leave them in the comments below. Happy Saturday!
