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Sibelius 4

Write, play, print, and publish music notation

Sibelius 4 is the complete software for writing, playing, printing and publishing music notation. It's designed to make your life easier, save you time, produce beautiful results - and enable you to do things you might never have dreamed of, like publish your music world-wide, or create your own CDs.

And it's designed for every kind of musician, from students and teachers to professional composers.

The new version Sibelius 4 takes another giant leap forward, with astonishing new features:

• Dynamic Parts - View movie
• Beautifully laid-out instrumental parts that magically update themselves whenever you change the full score
• Worksheet Creator View movie
• Save time by choosing from over 1700 high-quality worksheets, exercises, songs, instrumental pieces, lyrics, posters & other resources
• Video - View movie
• Now you too can compose a film/TV score! For professionals and students alike. Includes videos to write for, from Charlie Chaplin to Mr Bean
• Extra sounds
• 2 new collections of high-quality sounds available, for playing back and creating CDs and audio files - Garritan Personal Orchestra and Rock & Pop Collection

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Take a Tour

A comprehensive guide to Sibelius' features

• Look and feel
• Creating music
• Composing & arranging
• Playback
• Dynamic Parts
• Worksheet Creator
• Video
• Power tools
• Publishing
• Internet publishing
• Special notations
• Teaching with Sibelius

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Sibelius Look and Feel

The world's most intuitive music software

If you find a program hard to use, it's not your fault - it's because it's badly designed. That's why Sibelius was designed to be as natural as possible to use - the result of years of careful thought and refinement.

Toolbar - get the most useful features from the toolbar at the top

Getting started

Sibelius is so easy to learn and use that you can start writing your first piece within minutes - not days! It comes with a clear, friendly, non-technical handbook, which explains all the main features in just 70 pages.

But if you don't like reading manuals, don't worry - the program includes an hour of tutorial videos that explain how to use it. It also has comprehensive on-screen reference, so you'll never be stuck for an answer.

Clear, elegant design

The Sibelius screen is simple and intuitive, so you can concentrate on writing music without the constant distraction of menus and dialog boxes. To look around the music, just click and drag the page - it really feels like you're moving manuscript paper in front of you. Alternatively, drag the Navigator to move smoothly through many pages at once.

You can even choose different colors and textures for the paper and desk on the screen.

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Creating music in Sibelius

Start writing music quickly and easily

Starting off

Start a score from scratch - specify instruments, page size, title, tempo etc. with a few clicks.

Your score is set up instantly, all of the instruments with the correct names, clefs, transpositions and layout.

Watch movie: Starting a score

Then you can input notes in four easy ways:

MIDI input

Flexi-time is Sibelius's unique system for notating music as you play it on a MIDI keyboard in real time. There's no need to tap a pedal or play mechanically - just play naturally with both hands, and Sibelius will actually follow you as you speed up or slow down.

You can even listen to the music you've already written as you play in more music on top.

It takes just seconds to set up your score, ready for inputting notes

Step-time lets you play pitches from your MIDI keyboard with one hand, and choose rhythms and articulations with the other from the keypad (see picture).

Mouse & keystrokes

To input without a MIDI keyboard, pick note-values and accidentals from the keypad with the mouse, and click to place them in the score. For extra speed, use the computer keyboard instead - specify pitch using the letters A to G, and rhythms from the keypad using the numeric keys (see left). There are many other useful keyboard shortcuts for "power users."

You can get other markings such as clefs, slurs and time signatures from menus; Sibelius even positions them in the right place for you.

Watch movie: Note input

Scanning

Sibelius includes PhotoScore Lite - the state-of-the-art program for scanning printed music. It takes just seconds to read a page, and you can then edit or transpose the music in Sibelius, play it back, extract parts and print - just as if you'd inputted it yourself.

Watch movie: PhotoScore Lite and Professional

File conversion

Sibelius seamlessly opens Finale, MusicXML, MIDI, SCORE, Allegro and PrintMusic 1.0 files in seconds - the ideal way to transfer your existing music to Sibelius.

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Composing and arranging in Sibelius

You just think of the notes - Sibelius does the rest

Sketch & refine

Sibelius lets you change music whenever you like. Sketch a solo flute piece, then add a whole orchestra to create a concerto. Write in sounding pitch, then make a transposing score with one click. Add extra bars at the start of a score, and Sibelius instantly reformats every page - far more flexible than pen and paper.

If you completely change your mind, Sibelius lets you undo up to 20,000 operations, and keeps backups of 40 previous versions of your music.

Text & lyrics

Sibelius puts different types of text, such as dynamics, titles and lyrics, in the appropriate font, size and position. You can edit these text styles to change text consistently throughout the score.

To input lyrics, just type - Sibelius positions the words under the notes, puts in hyphens and lyric lines, and allows extra room for long syllables. You can also copy lyrics from a word processor.

Watch movie: Text

Watch movie: Adding markings

Arrange

Arrange is a unique feature to help with arranging and orchestration. It's ideal for students learning instrumental writing, and saves hours of time for experienced professionals.

Just select some music, and specify how you want it to be arranged or orchestrated - Sibelius does the rest in an instant, using appropriate instruments, doublings, etc. It handles anything from keyboard reductions and 'exploding' chords onto separate staves, to sophisticated arrangement and orchestration styles, such as:

• Band, using high brass and pitched percussion
• Choir, tenor doubling soprano down an octave
• Jazz, in the style of famous band leaders including Sammy Nestico, Billy Strayhorn and Thad Jones
• Impressionist orchestration with harp and strings.

Over 150 of these styles are provided, and you can even create your own.

Watch movie: Arrange

Focus on staves

Sibelius makes it easy to write large scores, by allowing you to view just the staves you're working on.

Copying & transposing

Copying music is far faster than re-writing it, so Sibelius copies anything with one click of the mouse - especially useful for doubled instruments and repeating figures. You can make multiple copies at once, e.g. to put the same dynamics onto every instrument.

Sibelius transposes music instantly into any key, and handles everything about transposing instruments for you. Write music in sounding or written pitch, and switch between the two whenever you like.

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Sibelius playback

Hearing is believing

Just click the play button to hear your music performed with surprising realism. Sibelius reads, understands and plays back all standard markings - including trills, repeats, cresc./dim. hairpins, 8vas, glissandos, percussion and drum sets, guitar tab, and even quarter-tones.

Mixer: adjust sounds, volume and pan position; solo or mute particular staves, etc.

Watch movie: Playback

Sibelius understands musical words and phrases such as: rit., pizz., Allegro, mute, swing, and change to Piccolo. Musical terms in various languages are already defined in a built-in dictionary - and you can add new words to it, too.

Sibelius lets you select specific instruments and sections of music to listen to, automatically playing the correct instrumental sounds through your soundcard or MIDI equipment.

Kontakt Player and creating CDs

Sibelius includes Kontakt Player Silver from Native Instruments, which provides high-quality playback of 19 pitched sounds and 100 unpitched percussion sounds (marked * here). You can also buy Kontakt Player Gold, which has 63 pitched sounds & 111 unpitched percussion sounds, covering orchestral, band, jazz etc. - even Bass Clarinet, Flugelhorn, string techniques (e.g. sul ponticello tremolo), male/female voices and choirs, and so on. Extra sound libraries are coming soon.

Sibelius 4 also makes it easy to create CDs and MP3 files for performers and friends, using the high-quality Kontakt Player sounds.

Sample library by Sonic Implants with instruments from Peter Seidlaczek (Best Service), Northstar, Zero-G, Tap Space and Dan Dean Productions.

Watch movie: Kontakt Player

Live Playback & Mixer

More advanced users can fine-tune playback in real time with the Mixer (see above), and use Sibelius's unique Live Playback feature to tweak the nuances of your original performance. You can adjust the dynamics using these colored bars (see left).

Espressivo & Rubato

Espressivo and Rubato are unique features which add elegant expression as Sibelius plays. Espressivo makes subtle adjustments to the dynamics to produce musical phrasing, and Rubato varies the tempo, just like a human performer.

Rhythmic feel, SoundStage & reverb

Sibelius lets you choose from numerous "rhythmic feel" styles which make subtle enhancements to the rhythm - anything from jazz swing to Viennese waltz!

When playing back scores for ensembles such as orchestra or band, Sibelius's unique SoundStage feature positions the sounds correctly in 3-D space, as if the instruments were on a concert stage. You can also choose the reverb characteristics of different natural acoustics.

Because Sibelius has such sophisticated playback features, you can use it for far more than just listening to music. Sibelius makes it easy to check the notes you've written, accompanies while you practice, and helps you make rehearsal tapes and CD recordings of your music.

Repeats

Sibelius supports every kind of repeat you can imagine - not just D.S., D.C., Coda, Segno and Fine, but complex repeat structures with up to 8 repetitions. You can even make Sibelius jump between arbitrary points in the score during playback, e.g. to skip guitar fill boxes or simulate aleatory performances.

You can make individual notes, dynamics etc. apply only to certain verses or repeats, so you could have the brass play only the second time round, or make verse 3 p and verse 4 f.

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Dynamic Parts in Sibelius

Parts in other programs

In other programs, to get instrumental parts you have to 'extract' them from the full score. You then have to spend time checking them and cleaning them up. And if you make revisions to the score later - which almost always happens in practice - you either have to spend ages making the same revisions in the parts yourself, or extract them all over again.

Not so in Sibelius.

Dynamic Parts

Sibelius has a unique feature called Dynamic Parts. You don't have to extract them - in fact, you don't have to do anything to get parts! As soon as you start a new score, all the parts are already there - and you can look at any of them from a list on the toolbar.

As you add music to the full score, it appears in the relevant parts too. In fact, whatever you do to the score, Sibelius instantly updates the parts. Or you can even write music in the parts, and the score will change to match! But you can also change things in parts without affecting the score if you like, such as adding cues.

The parts are transposed if necessary, have bar rests grouped into 'multirests', and include all the relevant markings such as time signature and tempo changes. So you don't have to think about anything.

Dynamic parts: watch movie

Auto Layout

Sibelius also takes care of the layout of parts for you. It puts page turns at convenient places, and positions rehearsal marks, new sections, key changes etc. at the start of systems, to make them easier for players to locate. In fact, you'll hardly need to adjust parts at all - just a quick look through and then print.

You can print a complete set of parts with one click of the mouse, and even specify how many copies you want for each instrument.

Overall, Dynamic Parts will save you many hours of work on every score - all the time spent writing out or extracting parts is now a thing of the past.

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Worksheet Creator in Sibelius

If you teach music, you'll know how long it can take to produce good curriculum materials. That's why we invented the unique Worksheet Creator, in collaboration with experienced teachers and educators.

The Worksheet Creator frees up many hours of your time by giving you a comprehensive range of ready-made teaching materials - over 1700 worksheets, projects, exercises, songs, instrumental pieces, lyrics, posters, reference material and other resources.

They can be used by individuals or groups in class, or for homework - either on paper or on computer. All of the materials are carefully designed to fulfil curriculum requirements, and to suit school students of all ages. Some of them (such as the repertoire and reference material) are also useful for universities and instrumental teachers.

Many of the worksheets have random questions that are different each time. You can produce both a worksheet for the student and a completed answer sheet to save time when marking. And it all takes just a few seconds.

Watch movie

"This is just what I've been waiting for. The worksheets are comprehensive and very useful"
Julia Richards, teacher

Creating a worksheet

Just choose from 6 main categories in the Worksheet Creator:

• Elements of music covers music theory and musicianship
• Writing and creating music includes notation, transposing, arranging, composing and improvising
• Selected repertoire has over 400 pieces for voice, piano and other instruments, including songs in 14 different languages and 50 Bach keyboard pieces, suitable for study, arranging and performance. There are also 45 poems to set to music.
• Reference includes over 200 scales and modes, ranges of different instruments, etc.
• Posters, flashcards & games has nearly 200 of these, from notes and keys to pictures of instruments
• UK KS3 & GCSE Projects has UK-specific projects from African drumming to serialism.

Each of these contains further sub-categories - for example, Elements of Music includes 14 areas, such as rhythm, scales, sight-reading and ear training; so with a few clicks you can narrow down your choice to just what you need.

Then just choose how many questions you want - and up pops the student worksheet, ready to use, plus a filled-in answer sheet to mark with.

Using your own worksheets

But you don't have to use the Worksheet Creator materials as they are. You can either adapt them to your own requirements, or create your own worksheets based on blank templates provided. You can also add your own worksheets to the Worksheet Creator for future re-use; or publish them on SibeliusEducation.com for your students to view, play, print and download.

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Video in Sibelius

Sibelius is already used for many films and TV shows - from Shrek 2 to The Simpsons. And you can use it yourself to write music to video. This is ideal for everything from student multimedia projects to professional scoring. No other notation program can do this.

As usual, it's very easy to do. You can simply add any video file to a score; Sibelius displays the video in a window, and plays it back in sync with the music. In fact, the video and score are always kept in sync, whether you're writing music, playing back, fast-forwarding or rewinding.

"For those of us who spend our days fitting music to pictures, this new feature is a dream come true"
Howard Goodall, film & TV composer
(Mr Bean, Blackadder)

You can play the video at different sizes or even full screen to watch the finished result; and Sibelius's audio export feature makes it easy for you to add your finished music to the video soundtrack.

But that's not all. You can add 'hit points' in the score to mark important visual events; these make it easy to write music to fit the action. Hit points automatically move when you alter metronome marks, so you can tweak the tempo to make a hit point fall exactly on a beat.

Watch movie

Videos included!

To get you started, Sibelius 4 comes with a variety of short videos to compose to - ranging from Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition to Chalie Chaplin.

And you can get more for free from SibeliusEducation.com. The Internet also has thousands of adverts and trailers to download, which are ideal for students to write for.

Timecode & score duration

Sibelius calculates the time position (timecode) of every bar and the total duration of the score to high precision - useful for film/TV scoring, or for any work which requires timings.

Timecode is written above barlines and shown as a digital clock during playback, taking into account tempo marks, irregular bars and rits/accels. Display formats include seconds, centiseconds and various frame rates.

(This feature does not display or sync to incoming SMPTE or MTC.)

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Sibelius power tools

Plug-ins

Sibelius includes a complete programming language called ManuScript, so you can even write your own plug-ins.

Properties

Rulers

Find & filters

Sibelius lets you search for notes, text and other markings, e.g. find the word "mute." Filters let you find and edit any number of these occurrences at once. For example, you can easily find all C#s in a harp part, then change them all to Db with a single keypress.

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Publishing with Sibelius

Elegant layout

Sibelius's unique page layout means that you won't have to worry about spacing, formatting, or how your score will look when it's printed. The music is beautifully laid out onto pages for you as you work - you don't need to think about it. If bars get too cramped, Sibelius pushes them onto the next page for you, and instantly adjusts slurs, hairpins etc. to suit. Even if you delete large sections, or change the shape of the paper, Sibelius will reformat the whole score in an instant.

But if you prefer, you can change the layout yourself: you can move staves around, specify where systems and pages end, alter note spacings, and squash up or spread out whole passages of music. You're in complete control.

House Styles & engraving rules

You can even save house styles to disk and import them into other scores.

Watch movie: Layout & house styles

Graphics & color

Sibelius imports color and black-and-white graphics, for adding pictures, logos, photos, cover pages and special notations to your music. Sibelius comes with dozens of graphics ready to use - or create your own.

You can color in notes, text, symbols, etc. - useful for educational music, marking up sketches, and making important markings stand out. They print in color, too.

Watch movie: Color

Watch movie: Exporting graphics

You can also export music from Sibelius to graphics, desktop publishing and word processor programs in a variety of standard file formats, e.g. EPS and TIFF. This makes it easy to incorporate music into anything from coursework and exam papers, to books and posters.

No 'faking'

Sibelius automatically handles many tricky notations that other programs have to fake, such as: collisions between voices (layers), multi-arc slurs with any number of arcs, beams over rests and across barlines, cross-staff beams between three staves, text and wavy lines at any angle (e.g. gliss.), and ossias.

Music fonts & symbols

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Internet publishing with Sibelius

Reach a worldwide audience for your music

The Internet is the fastest-growing technology of all time - and Sibelius helps you use it to your advantage. Sibelius not only prints your music conventionally, but also lets you put it straight onto your own web site, or onto SibeliusMusic.com, the world's largest site for self-publishing scores.

Additionally, teachers and educators can publish teaching materials onto SibeliusEducation.com for their students to view, play and print at school or home.

Scorch

From your own web site, anyone, anywhere can view, play, transpose and print your music. Visitors to your site don't need Sibelius - they just download Scorch, the amazing free plug-in for browsing scores online. You can also let people save music from your site or SibeliusEducation.com onto disk - ideal for giving coursework to students.

SibeliusMusic.com

From SibeliusMusic.com you can publicize and sell your music worldwide. You can even include your biography, photograph, contact details and list of scores on your own page on the site.

Watch movie: Internet publishing

SibeliusEducation.com

SibeliusEducation.com also lets you exchange teaching materials, information and ideas with other teachers worldwide - and get additional free materials & resources from Sibelius Software.

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Special notations in Sibelius

How to notate every kind of music

Many different forms of music notation have evolved over the past ten centuries. With Sibelius, you can create scores in any of these styles.

Avant garde notation

Sibelius handles modern notations such as quarter tones (which play and transpose), complex tuplets (with multiple nesting), feathered beams, colored markings, extreme note values, music in multiple keys, and special note designs. To cover all eventualities, you can import graphics for invented notations and graphic scores.

Guitar tab & chord diagrams

Guitar tab with Sibelius couldn't be easier. You can input tab just like other music (using MIDI, mouse or keystrokes), or you can instantly convert notation to tab, or tab to notation.

Sibelius has comprehensive support for markings such as bends, slides, hammer-on and vibrato bar. These too automatically convert between notation and tab. You can even write tab for any fretted instrument (mandolin, banjo, lute, dobro...), in any tuning you like.

To get a chord diagram, just name the chord you want, and pick the frame from the choice given. In fact, Sibelius calculates all possible positions for any standard chord. And like tab, Sibelius produces chord diagrams for any fretted instrument, in any tuning.

Jazz, commercial & rock music

Chord symbols, drum sets, slashes and other popular notations are all included - plus the special Inkpen2 font to make your printouts look handwritten!

Early music

For early music, Sibelius easily notates ossias, figured bass, numerous ornaments, incipits, all C-clefs, special barlines (e.g. Mensurstrich), stemless notes and longs. It even writes and plays back lute tablature.

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Teaching with Sibelius

How will Sibelius help me?

Sibelius is suitable for all educational levels - it's easy for beginners, yet sophisticated enough for all university requirements.

Sibelius helps teachers with preparing teaching materials and arrangements. It lets students hear how their work sounds, makes it easy to find and correct mistakes, and is much more fun to use than pen and paper!

At university level, Sibelius satisfies the most advanced requirements, from avant garde and early music notation to Schenkerian analysis.

If you're an instrumental teacher, Sibelius makes it quick to create exercises, scan in and transpose pieces, and produce accompaniments and arrangements - you'll never need to write out parts again!

Worksheets

Sibelius's Worksheet Creator lets you produce over 1700 different ready-made worksheets, exercises, projects, songs, instrumental pieces, posters and other resources, suitable for students at all levels.

Watch movie: Worksheet Creator

Internet studying

With Sibelius, you can put coursework onto your school/university web site or SibeliusEducation.com for students to view, play, print and save to disk. SibeliusEducation.com also provides additional teaching materials and resources from other educators and from Sibelius Software.

Sibelius comes with free-time limited access to GroveMusic.com, the Internet version of the world's leading music encyclopedia.

Video

Sibelius comes with a variety of short videos to compose to - from Charlie Chaplin to Mr Bean. You can get further ones from SibeliusEducation.com, or download trailers and adverts to write to from many other web sites.

Arranging & transposing

The Arrange feature saves hours of time in creating arrangements and keyboard reductions. It's also ideal for students who are learning arranging, composition or even orchestration.

Transposing is another great time-saver for putting pieces into suitable keys, and adjusting exercises for different instruments or abilities.

Watch movie: Arrange

Playback

When playing, Sibelius selects the right instrumental sounds, reads markings straight from the score and adds expression, so students get a realistic rendition of their music right away. And they can check for mistakes, just by listening. (read more)

You can also use Sibelius to play aural tests, accompaniments, and even create CDs and MP3 files of your music.

Color & graphics

Notes which are too high/low are shown in red; you can adjust instrument ranges to write for players of different abilities. Music can be hidden, so students can fill in an exercise on computer and then reveal the right answer.

Sibelius lets you add color, pictures and graphic notations to coursework; lots of graphics are included. You can also take music from Sibelius into word processors and graphics packages, for creating worksheets, posters, etc. in other programs.

Watch movie: Color

Watch movie: Exporting graphics

Plug-ins

Sibelius includes many educational plug-ins, to automate tasks such as writing note names and beats above notes, creating sets of scales and arpeggios, adding brass/string fingering and tonic sol-fa, and identifying motives for musical analysis.

School features

Students find Sibelius so much fun to use in the classroom that they sometimes play around with it instead of getting on with their work! So you can switch off all of the advanced features with a couple of clicks, leaving only the main things students need for coursework.

You can also turn individual features on/off, and create your own sets of features for different classes - e.g. if you're teaching how to transpose by hand, you can stop students transposing it automatically!