One thing I have found to be an absolute asset to my teaching so far is my skills using Sibelius. For those of you who don’t already know, Sibelius is a musical notation software. It it incredibly easy to use, and you can compose orginal compositions that look professional. As a matter of fact, Sibelius is becoming increasingly more popular on the musical publishing front. I have done quite a bit of engraving work (preparing music for publication) for various publishers nationally, and they all used Sibelius.
For those of you who are members of the Finale Faithful, you have a great program there as well. Early on, I could see the differences in terms of flexibility and in some advanced features in Finale being more useful, but since then Sibelius has turned things around quite a bit. Some composers have told me they think of Sibelius as being a program for people who just want a quick and dirt score to put out. Well, I have created some pretty incredible looking scores, and if I don’t say so myself, better than those of the people who complain the most.
I am currently working on a post dedicated to taking a novice through a step by step process in Sibelius, using screen shots and easy to follow steps. By the end of it, you will be well on your way to become a Sibelius Guru.
More soon.
Stengel99 said,
February 24, 2008 at 3:17 pm
For years I was a “nothing but Finale” person. Then my district bought Sibelius for all its teachers and brought in a clinician to teach the basics.
The big feature that made me decide to switch to Sibelius was dynamic parts. That is, if you make a change in the score, it automatically appears in the part too, and vis versa. In Finale, once a part was extracted, any changes had to be made in both documents. This is especially a pain if you are adding or deleting measures.
There are still elements of Finale I prefer, but all in all, I’ve made the switch.