Welcome to another helpful hint in my ‘Tips and Tricks’ sessions.

Creating a lead sheet in Sibelius and using ‘plug-ins’. In this session, I will be taking you through the process of creating a simple lead sheet consisting of a melody line, chord symbols and lyrics. Then, I will show you a couple of useful ‘plug-ins’ that will help with creating a simple backing track complete with a strummed guitar, a drum pattern and a simple harmony line. The tune we will use is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’.

So,

• Create a score with a single percussion staff using the blank staff template.

• Click once on the template and you will be asked to choose your desired instrument (we will choose voice),

• Choose 4/4 for the Time Signature, • Choose C major for the key signature. • Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as the Title.

Now click on ‘Create’. You should see this window. We need only 4 bars for this session, so I will delete a bar by holding down the Ctrl key (Cmd for Mac) and click in Bar 5. It will change colour to purple. Press the Delete key.

Entering the melody. To enter the melody, you have many options. Click on the ‘Note Input’ tab.

1. Select the note value from the Keypad panel and place the notes on the staff.

2. Connect your midi keyboard, select the note value from the Keypad panel and press the appropriate keys on the keyboard.

3. Connect your midi keyboard; click where you would like to start your recording, click on the Record icon.

4. Click on the ‘view’ tab, select panels and select Keyboard. Select the note value from the Keypad panel and click with your mouse on the desired note pitch.

You should now have the following melody. Press the space bar to listen to the melody.

Now, let’s add the chord symbols. Click on the ‘Text’ tab. Then click on the ‘Chord Symbols’ icon. Your arrow will turn blue. Click on the first note of the score. You will see a ‘flashing cursor’ above the highlighted note. Type C ‘Upper case’. Then hit space bar to advance to the third note of the bar. Type C ‘Upper case’ again. Move ahead with the space bar and continue adding the chords. Your score should now look like this.

Now, let’s add the lyrics. Click on the ‘Text’ tab. Then click on the ‘Lyrics icon.

Your arrow will turn blue. Click on the first note of the score. You will see a ‘flashing cursor’ above the note. As the first word will be hyphenated, we will need to type the following….. Twin (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -kle, Twin (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -kle, Lit (press the hyphen key, then press the space bar) -tle star. Continue to add the lyrics in the same manner.

Your score should now look like this.

Save your work. Now that we have the lead line, we can use a number of the wonderful Sibelius ‘plug-ins’ to add a simple harmony, a strummed guitar chord line and a drum pattern. Step 1. Add a simple Harmony. Double click in the first bar to highlight the line of music.

Go to the ‘Note input’ tab. Click on the ‘plug-ins’ icon and select ‘add a simple harmony’. Make the following choices and click on create.

Your score should now look like this.

Now, highlight the top staff again. Go to the ‘Text’ tab, select ‘plug-ins’, select ‘Realize chord symbols’

Your score should now look like this.

Now we will add a ‘strumming effect’ to the guitar staff. Highlight the guitar staff.

Go to the ‘Play’ tab. Select ‘plug-ins’ and select ‘Strummer’.

Your score should now look like this.

Finally, we will add a drum pattern. Sibelius has a great percussion Plug-In called ‘Add a Drum Pattern’. This automatically creates a drum pattern from a choice of 20-programmed patterns. However, you may find that when you play back the pattern using the Sibelius 7 Sounds, you may find that some of the notes do not play back with the correct sound or even no sound at all. When this happens, the simple fix is to either ‘Edit’ the percussion staff or create a ‘new’ percussion staff based on the current one selected. You will now be asked to choose a drum patterns from a range of the 20 patterns available. I am going to ‘un tick’ all the boxes and choose the ‘Soft rock: ballad (90 – 110 bpm). Click OK.

Your score should now look like this.

Any questions, just contact Ray Partridge at Music Technology Matters. Phone: +61 418 159 916 Email: ray@musictechnologymatters.com Web: www.musictechnologymatters.com